Steam
by Bella Temple
Summary: Dean was supposed to get a year, and then go to Hell. Instead, as far as he was concerned, he got most of a year, and then Hell came to him. Post-apocalyptic AU, spins off from Jus in Bello
1. Chapter 1

**Warnings/Spoilers:** Post-apocalyptic AU, spins off canon at "Jus in Bello"  
**Author's note: **Written for the 2008 spn_j2_bigbang challenge. Beta-ed by maisfeeka, mara_sho, and tinylegacies, with art by mithborien (available on via my LiveJournal). This story is complete -- five chapters will be posted over the course of five days.

* * *

_Chapter One_

It is an absurdity, it is laughable, to speak of such a pending disaster as  
"The End of the World." We are discussing the end of Humanity, or we are  
discussing the end of Civilization, or we are perhaps even discussing the  
end of some this or that Empire that we mistakenly believe to identify with.

The end of the _world_ will come when the sun expands and engulfs it.

-- Takici Kaneko, 1934

* * *

So. _She says, as she pours you your first drink. She has that way of talking and telling a story that always frustrates you, as though you should know exactly who and what she's talking about without her ever really explaining it. You didn't ask her for a story, just for a whiskey. You've had a long, hard ride this morning, and a great deal of work to do before you can go to bed. But she pours the whiskey and isn't charging for the story, so you simply nod, take your glass when it's full, and settle into the seat at the bar._ So here's what you have to realize: Dean never got rid of that car. Even after it was all over, he refused to give up on her. If there was no gas, he reasoned, he'd just have to get her to run on something else.

It was slow going, of course. No easy task, retrofitting an internal combustion engine with just whatever equipment you could cobble together on the fly, especially not when you didn't have access to anything resembling the proper equipment.

Sam tried to talk him out of it. Said they had to focus, adapt. Said it was a waste of time. Said it was "pointlessly nostalgic".

"Your face is pointlessly nostalgic," Dean said, his expression unreadable behind a pair of large, circular, welding goggles.

And Sam had no comeback for that.

Because Dean was right.

* * *

Dean had once put together an EMF meter out of an old Sony walkman, a trashed microwave, and an alarm clock. Up until everything went down, he'd been pretty sure it was going to be the greatest thing he ever made. One of the only things he'd ever make. Tinkering with things, unless the end result would be helpful on the hunt, wasn't a past-time that John Winchester approved of, and all of Dean's past-times had to be John Winchester approved. Sawed-off shotguns were fine, salt rounds were excellent, but the EMF meter, and anything higher tech, was extravagance, especially when it only took a phony credit card or a couple nights' hustling to get the cash to buy a "real" one.

Still, there was no more John Winchester around now to disapprove, and Dean wasn't letting his baby go. _Adapt_ Sam said. So Dean adapted, by adapting his car.

Personally, he thought the caterpillar treads were kind of hot.

* * *

They holed up in an abandoned high school in Northern Georgia that first summer. It wasn't hard to find; all the rural schools were abandoned. People were as into the idea of education these days as they were into the idea of anything that wasn't a requirement for direct, gritty survival. Which was to say: not at all.

They wanted to keep moving, of course, but gas was becoming almost laughably scarce, and Dean's first idea for the new Impala involved steam, which was _hot as fuck_, as he put it. That didn't matter to Sam, these days, but they both agreed that they wouldn't get far if Dean was constantly passing out behind the wheel from heat exhaustion, and air conditioning wasn't something Dean felt qualified to tackle, yet.

They pulled the Impala in through the loading doors of the school's theater and parked her center stage. The scene shop had lots of glue and paint thinner, which made Dean happy. Sam didn't pretend to understand and mostly left his brother to his own devices.

He freaked the first time he came in on Dean in those green, bug-eyed goggles and the heavy apron over his t-shirt and jeans. Dean grinned, which only tripled the creepy, and struck a pose with his hands on his hips.

"Awesome, right?" He reached up and pushed the goggles up onto his forehead. His eyes were crinkled nearly shut with the force of his smile. "Found 'em in the dressing rooms back there. Found you a hat, too." And he leaned over and dug out an old fashioned aviator's helmet, probably circa WWI. He twirled the thing on one hand with a waggle of his eyebrows.

Sam didn't wear hats, even before. But he showed up in that aviator's thing from time to time, just to make Dean smile.

* * *

Dean didn't know what Sam got up to when he wasn't in the theater, watching Dean work on the Impala. He wasn't always entirely certain whether or not Sam existed when he wasn't around Dean.

It didn't bear thinking about. Much more important was working out how to counter-balance the extra weight from the new rear-mounted engine for his car. A "frunk" was clearly the way to go; they still had to transport all their weapons, after all. Even if it did make his baby sound like one of those ridiculous old punch-buggies.

Speaking of which, he wondered if he should work out how to make the Impala float.

* * *

Sam came into the theater their second day in the high school, fresh from scoping out the food situation -- all vending machine junk food, most of the chocolate and chips already snagged, leaving them with the pop-tarts and CLIFF bars -- to find Dean bending over the Impala's hood, humming Cole Porter.

"Dude." He leaned over next to Dean, looking at the mess of metal and tubing and belts and wires that despite Dean's efforts to teach him, he still couldn't understand. "Is that 'Anything Goes'?"

Dean whistled a phrase, then straightened, wiping a rag over his sweaty forehead. He didn't bother pushing the goggles up. "Nah, man. That song from Indiana Jones. Can't get it out of my head."

Sam shook his head. Dean grinned suddenly.

"Dancing girls are nice, though."

Sam was afraid to ask.

* * *

Most of the theater was coated in a fine layer of white powder that piled up in seemingly random spots. It was all over the stage and the dressing rooms, tarnishing the undersides of the instruments still lying in the pit. It was thickest through out the audience. There were a few scattered piles of the stuff in other areas of the school: the hallway that lined the theater, of course, and the bathrooms closest to it, a set of five in the gym, two in the main office.

Neither Sam nor Dean wanted to talk about what it was, or where it had come from. But Dean swept up what was on the stage with great care, filling a five gallon bucket and placing it at one corner of the stage with a bright bouquet of fake lilies on the lid.

* * *

Welding was hot, sweaty, hard work, especially when one was working with a rigged up torch that ran on paint thinner and trying to work with trumpets and tubas as well as mufflers. Dean kept the exterior doors to the theater propped open most of the time during the daylight hours. There was this weird sense that that was when it was safe. It was stupid -- for most of his life, he hadn't actually been any safer in daylight than in the dark, but the theater was at the back end of the school, overlooking the football field at the end of the parking lot. There was no way in, not through the loading bay or the emergency exits, without crossing a shit load of open ground. He could see what was on all that open ground a lot better in the daylight than he could at night.

* * *

They were there four days before Sam spotted the first teenager. He was maybe fourteen years old, wearing the remains of a letter jacket and filthy cargo pants, with no shoes. He didn't see Sam. Sam followed him through the empty hallways, watching him skitter from doorway to doorway, his eyes always wide and almost fever bright. He never went near the theater.

There were five of them in total, the youngest about twelve, the oldest, nineteen. All of them gritty and wild-eyed, _Lord of the Flies_ feral and holed up in one of the chemistry labs on the second floor. They kept a fire burning under the ventilation hood, fueled by old text books and handouts. This, then, was where the chocolate and bags of chips from the vending machines had gone.

The twelve year old noticed Sam first, and once she had, they all did. They screamed, and when Sam lifted his hands and tried to reassure them that he wasn't dangerous, that he was here to help, they threw empty chip bags and Milky Way wrappers at him until he left.

He returned to the theater to find Dean on his hands and knees on the stage, back bare and sweaty despite the cross-breeze coming in through the open emergency doors. He had the goggles, now as ever present as his amulet, pushed up high on his forehead, and he was scratching out a sketch of his plans for the Impala on a full sheet of painted plywood. Sam couldn't make heads or tails of it.

Dean was singing this time, softly, under his breath:

_Once I was headed for hell,  
Once I was headed for hell;  
But when I got to Satan's door  
I heard you blowin' on your horn once more,  
So I said, "Satan, farewell"_

Sam had no trouble interrupting him.

"There's kids in the school."

Dean shrugged. "It's a school."

"They're living here."

Dean sat back, wiped at his chin, and stared at Sam.

". . . I'll go talk to them."

Sam didn't follow him.

* * *

Dean didn't say anything when he came back, just walked straight through the theater, pausing to give the Impala a quick rub on the roof, and headed out the loading bay, across the parking lot, and down the street to the abandoned shopping center a mile away.

He returned an hour later with a shopping cart full of bottled water, soda, goldfish crackers, and cans of spaghettios. He rolled it in through the theater and out into the hallways.

After that, he split his time between working on the Impala and talking with the kids. Sam never followed him.

* * *

The kids weren't bad, Dean decided, once you got past the combined weight of their general twitchiness. Still, considering what he knew they had seen, who he was pretty sure they'd lost, the twitches were understandable. Really, they were getting along remarkably well.

"Mr. Dean!" Tabitha, the twelve year old with unfortunate, mousy hair and braces, was always the first to notice him when he came. She'd latch herself onto the hem of his shirt and wouldn't let go until he headed for the door. None of them ever followed him very far into the hallways. Tabby was the one who'd started the nickname, but the older ones had taken it up quickly. _Mr. Dean_, like he was some kind of authority figure. He supposed maybe he was. There certainly weren't a lot of other people lining up for the job.

"Heya, Tabby. How's it going?"

"Mark's hurt."

Mark was the one Sam had seen in the hallways, the bravest of the bunch. Just now he was seated on one of the lab tables, one leg folded up underneath him, the other swinging idly back and forth over the edge. He looked okay to Dean.

"Mark?" He stepped over, hands held carefully lose by his sides. The kids always flinched when he moved too quickly or hid his hands. "What's up, man?"

"It's nothing. Tabby's overreacting."

"It's not 'nothing'," Tabby insisted. "Show him your hand."

Dean lifted an eyebrow at Mark, not moving forward until he got permission. Mark huffed a heavy, teenaged sigh and held out his hand. A long blister covered the side of his palm. Dean let out a low whistle.

"How'd it happen?"

"He was trying to cook." This from Kathleen, the oldest of the group. "I told him we could eat it cold."

"Shut up, Kathleen."

"You shut up."

"No, you --"

"Okay." Dean interrupted quickly. This back and forth could last awhile if he let it. "That burn's pretty bad, man. You gotta put something on it."

Mark shrugged. "I know that. I'm not an idiot. I ran it under the tap."

"I wasn't saying -- look. You did pretty good, but there's some cold creme down in the theater, we could --"

"No." Scott, fifteen and built like a bear, stepped up in between Mark and Dean. Dean took a step back, raising his hands.

"I'm not saying you have to go. I could bring it up here."

He hated their fear of the theater, but he understood it. Scott, for all that he looked like he should have been a wrestler or a line backer, had been a theater geek, before. He'd been in the lighting booth the night that everything changed. Paul, the scrawny seventeen year old with a face straight out of _Dawson's Creek_ or some other teen drama, had been on stage. Between the two of them, they'd quickly convinced the other three that the theater was not to be trusted. Dean planned to fix all that, convince them that it was safe. But it wasn't going to happen overnight.

"No," Scott said again, quietly and simply, and Dean sighed and let it go.

"How you guys doing on supplies?"

Kathleen shrugged. "We're okay."

"We're running out of toothpaste," Mark said. "I was gonna go get it, but Tabby thinks I can't walk."

"I do not!"

Dean sighed, grabbed a chair, and sat down. "If you go, make sure you get some burn cream from the pharmacy. I can get it, if you want."

"We don't need you to." Mark tucked his hand under his arm again. "You don't have to take care of us."

"Not sayin' I do. Just offering."

"Well, don't."

"I don't mind when you offer," Tabby said, dropping into her usual position, crosslegged on the floor by Dean's legs. Dean settled in for the long haul. This was what he did, when he wasn't working on the Impala. He sat with the kids, offered his advice, and tried to take care of them as much as they'd let him. It was the least he could do, really.

It was his fault they were here.

* * *

There were two lofts on either side of the stage in the school's theater. Both were accessed by spiraling, black iron staircases, both were thickly cluttered, as though waiting for the students to come back from summer vacation and work on another show. The lower loft was maybe twelve feet from the stage floor and contained six double rows of dusty costuming, from Elizabethan and Victorian dresses to military jackets of every variety. One of the racks towards the back had collapsed under its own weight at some point, leaving a thick pile of velvet, cotton, and satin. It had easy access to the lighting grid over the audience, the guide-ropes for the curtains and backdrops, and the stage itself, and provided a decent view of the exterior doors. This was where Dean spent his nights. The costumes, while dusty and slightly moldering, were at least more comfortable than the stage floor.

The higher loft was probably twenty-five or thirty feet up, too high and too dark for its contents to be easily visible from anywhere but in the loft itself. It was connected with the lower one by a catwalk and a series of ladders. It was filled with antique phones, plastic fruit, and paintings of dogs. Rubber chickens, giant gold keys, and stuffed animals. Wrapped, empty boxes, hardbound books of plays, and old copies of "TIME" magazine. Things that did nothing but take up space.

"Props," Sam called them.

"Steam engine fuel," Dean called them, though secretly, he was fascinated by the old manual typewriters and wind-up clocks.

This was where Dean planned to stick the kids, once he coaxed them out of their chemistry lab and convinced them that neither Sam nor the theater was evil.

And, you know, cleared out the ghosts.

* * *

Sam didn't notice the cold, and he hadn't been able to smell anything in months, so the first hint he had that things in the theater weren't totally copacetic was walking in on Dean working on the Impala and noticing that his brother wasn't damp. Dean was constantly damp, these days. When he wasn't coated in sweat, he was fresh out of a shower in the boy's locker room next to the gym. The fact that there was running water was a minor miracle neither of them bothered to question. The electricity had cut out weeks ago.

"Dean," he said.

"What?"

"You're not sweating."

"It's cold in here, sometimes."

"Oh."

It should have occurred to him why. But things like restless spirits seemed somehow too mundane to worry about, these days.

"Stick around for a bit, bro." Dean looked up at him, his expression masked by those damned goggles. "We'll probably get a floor show, soon."

Sam stuck around. But nothing happened.

* * *

It never happened when Sam was around. Dean didn't notice at first, just because neither of them was ever really around, these days. Dean was always focused on the Impala and the new engine and the kids, and Sam was, well. Sam was _something_, anyway, somewhere else for most of the day, and Dean didn't want to know what or where. But when Sam stuck around that day, the air kept getting colder, never leveling off the way it usually did. The temperature dropped until Dean's jaw clenched and his shoulders shook. He put on his leather jacket, which helped a little, but his breath still clouded the air, like tiny puffs of steam, and Sam's didn't.

Sam's never did.

It wasn't just the cold. The air seemed to grow heavy around them, crisp but dense, like the static buildup just before a lightning strike. Dean felt it prickling across the skin of his arms, and the back of his neck. His hair, which had been half-weighted down with sweat and half-spiked with grease, tingled against his scalp as it strained to stand up on end, individual follicles repelling each other. The energy built until he could scarcely breathe, couldn't touch anything conductive for fear of electrocuting himself. Then, finally, Sam sighed and said "I'm gonna -- I wanna check something out" and then "see you later" and then was gone.

And the air was hot and damp again, the charge dissipated, and Dean could breathe.

* * *

That evening, when the sky was a deep, muted purple and the last of the pink on the horizon started to fade, Dean went to close the stage doors, and the temperature dropped again. Dean crossed the front of the stage, saw his breath and felt the eyes. He turned slowly to the right, facing the audience. He took a breath that tasted of maple syrup and grease paint and felt his chest lift and fill with something more than just air. It was a charge, though not like before. An electric singing that somehow didn't burn. He felt, for a moment, like he could do anything. Like he could fly without fear or blow the roof off the whole theater with the sound of his voice alone. It was a high of a successful hunt, just before he sent the creature or ghost or demon to its maker. The feeling he got just before a woman led him back to her bed (or, you know, her car, or maybe a convenient wall). It was exhilarating, and it was terrifying. Because it came from _them_.

The audience was full.

He couldn't exactly see them -- the light from the battery powered-lamp he kept by the Impala at night didn't reach that far. But their anticipation and the sound of them shifting slightly in their seats or whispering filled the theater. They were waiting for something from him.

A light came on with an audible snap and a hum, a spotlight high in the grid, bright white and filling his vision as it trained on him. Dean lifted his hand and squinted his eyes, baring his teeth with a soft, hissing exhale.

The electricity had shut off weeks ago.

"I'm gonna need a helluva lot of salt."

* * *

It wasn't that Sam didn't exist when he wasn't around Dean. It was that it was harder. Not just without Dean, but without _someone_ else there. He was the tree falling in the forest, he thought sometimes, in his more abstract moments. The thing was, as far as he could tell, he'd always been that way. For all their differences, Sam and Dean had one thing in common: neither of them did "alone" well.

Still, though it was easier to locate himself when he was near Dean, Sam spent a good deal of his time away from him. He had no explanation for it, and it wasn't as though he was accomplishing much. He called it "scouting", which probably explained the aviator's helmet. Either that or Dean just thought that Sam looked absurd in it. And Sam did "scout"; he'd explored the small town around the school thoroughly in the weeks that they spent there, and knew every building and every tree as though he'd lived there all his life. It was their usual division of labor: Dean handled the physical work, while Sam did the information gathering. It worked well for them. They were a team.

Perhaps that was how Sam knew something was happening. It wasn't as though he was anywhere near the theater. He couldn't hear Dean, and he couldn't feel him. He just knew.

And so he went back.

Quickly.

* * *

Something rattled amongst the lights above the stage. That was Dean's only warning. He jumped back, and the spotlight jumped with him. The rattling object missed his head by inches and struck the stage with a solid *thwack*, then rolled noisily into the white circle of the spotlight. It was a can of hair spray. Dean stared down at it as it rolled to a stop in front of his boot and then, because he had to, because he'd always had the driving urge to touch and taste everything around him, he nudged it with his foot.

The stage exploded with light and sound as a musical number erupted into full swing around him. The dancing girls and the horns, which before had only been soft shadows and half-remembered shades, surrounded him, larger and brighter than life. Spotlights reflected off white sailor's uniforms and seemed to stab directly into Dean's corneas, and every blast from the pit orchestra and the singers collided with his eardrums with the force of a train. Dean's legs folded beneath him and he dropped to the stage boards, the spot light following his every move. He pressed his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut, but he couldn't block them out. It seemed to last for hours. His ribcage rattled with every beat of the music. Something warm and vital seeped through his fingers where they clutched at his ears. The lights blinded him through his eyelids, and though his goggles pressed against his forehead, he couldn't reach up to pull them down and protect his eyes.

The air began to grow hot. Not the damp, smothering heat of the day, but drier, baking into his skin. He hissed and grunted -- could feel the sounds in his throat and on his lips, but couldn't hear them over the chorus.

_I've gone through brimstone  
And I've been through the fire,  
And I purged my soul  
And my heart too_

"No," he said, though that sound, too, was lost. "No, no, not again. Please, not again, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, not again, please. . . ." Over and over as the tempo of the music increased, the crashing of the cymbals almost continuous, the high notes of the song climbing higher and higher, until they became screams.

* * *

Sam's fastest, though faster than it had ever been before, wasn't fast enough. He reached the theater to find Dean on his knees, folded over on himself and rocking. Blood seeped through his fingers from his ears, starkly scarlet in the bright light that filled the space. Semi-transparent forms circled him, spinning and reaching out in a choreographed horror, each measure bringing them closer and closer to his brother, and Dean shuddered in time.

_No._ This shouldn't be happening. It couldn't.

Sam wouldn't let it.

The song picked up its pace, and the dancers in their white costumes began to glow as Sam made his way onto the stage, his mouth opening in a scream. They bent and twisted away from him, their wide, singing mouths warping as the light grew brighter and brighter until Sam couldn't make out where it ended and the spirits and his brother began.

And then it ended. Just. Like. That.

* * *

The light cut out, but Dean couldn't see anything through the after-images. The sound stopped, but Dean was still deafened by the ringing. The pain ended, but it left behind a hollow space between Dean's eyes that ached almost as furiously.

But he was Dean Winchester, so he blinked until he could make out Sam's face through the splotches of green and orange. He shook his head to dislodge the ringing, and he pushed back the ache until it was bearable, and he forced himself to function.

Faint, glistening specks of light floated through the darkened, dry air of the theater like falling snow, like ash, and settled on Dean's hands and Sam's shoulders, then vanished. The theater was empty, save for Sam, Dean, and the Impala, huddled together on the black stage in the dim, bluish light of the battery powered lantern.

Sam reached out to brush his fingers over Dean's temple. "You okay?"

Dean nodded, then swallowed, then didn't trust himself to speak so he nodded again. Sam settled back a little, giving him space, then huffed a soft laugh.

"Floor show sucks, man."

Dean swallowed, managed a croaked "yeah," then slid slowly sideways until he lay half-curled on the warm, black stage.

* * *

The kids were gone.

The fire under the ventilation hood still burned, but it was smoldering, now. Scattered wrappers from candy bars and flavored chips circled five piles of fine, white powder.

Dean threw up in the eye-wash station.

"We're leaving," he said, when he got back to the theater.

Sam frowned. "Is the Impala ready?"

Dean looked at the car, at the tangled mass of brass tubing and copper wire that spilled every which way from the trunk. He looked back at Sam, his expression blank.

"We're leaving," he said again.

A week later, on the first of August, Sam found a tow truck that still had half a tank of gas, and they left.


	2. Chapter 2

_Chapter Two_

It is too constricting to say that you must always think outside  
the box; whether you are thinking inside or outside the box, you  
are still letting the box dictate your thoughts, are you not? What  
you are not acknowledging is the honest fact that "the box"  
itself is figmentary, illusory. . . .

-- Erica Amelia Smith, _An Address as to the Nature of the  
"proper" Uses of Technology_

* * *

_You've finished your fourth whiskey, now, and are perfectly satisfied with your level of inebriation. You have another long ride ahead of you tomorrow, and it'll do you no good to try and do it hung over._

_She's drinking now, too, though. You're alone in the bar; it must be past closing time. She nods to your bag, says something about taking notes as she pulls out a bowl of peanuts._

_You want to ask why, but to speak would break the rhythm of the story she's weaving, and you're interested enough by now to want to know the rest, so you pull the journal out of your bag, find yourself a pen with a decent nib, and start writing. She gives you a few moments to catch up, then continues._

* * *

"We should go to DC," Sam said. He had to almost shout to be heard over the rumbling of the tow truck's engine, the rattle of the Impala behind them, and the whistle of the wind coming in through the open windows. Dean drove directly into the setting sun with his goggles pulled down over his eyes.

Dean turned his head slightly to look at Sam, the sun making the lenses of his goggles glow. "What?!"

"Go to DC!" Sam said louder, pitching his voice over the noises of the road and, he hoped, the fading ringing in Dean's still slightly bloody ears.

Dean rocked his head back, turning back to the road and swerving carefully around the remains of a wrecked Toyota. He shook his head. "This ain't _The Stand_, Sammy! We're not going to find a buncha plucky survivors rebuilding society in a big city!" Dean shouted so he could hear himself speak. Sam could hear him no matter how loud everything else was.

"I said DC, not Boulder!" Sam shouted, then let out a sigh when Dean stopped the truck. He lowered his voice. "I think we should check out the Library of Congress."

Dean snorted. "What, you've got a burning need to get your geek on?"

Sam looked to the ceiling, then back at Dean. "The government's been researching alternative sources of energy, Dean. Natural gas, coal, biodiesel. All of it will be archived at the Library of Congress."

Dean shook his head. "Don't need it. We've got a plan."

Sam pressed his lips together. "You're never going to get a steam engine into the Impala, Dean. Not with stuff you found in a high school theater. That's just. It's just physics, man."

Dean looked at Sam, then reached up and pulled his goggles down around his neck, then looked at Sam some more. The corners of his mouth tightened and twitched. It was almost a smile.

"Yeah," he said. "'Cause you and me, we've always followed the laws of physics."

* * *

They had always followed the laws of physics, actually. Even Dean had to admit that. They were, after all, only human.

Or, had been, at the very least.

But things were changing. Had been for a long time and were doing so even faster, these days. The steam engine would work. Dean could make it work. Sam might've had all the formal education. He might've been the one with the weird, probably demon-driven supernatural abilities. But Dean knew engines. And he knew the Impala.

It would work.

* * *

The tow truck had a large tank, so half of it was still a substantial amount. Unfortunately, the thing's mileage was for shit. Half a tank of gas didn't get them very far, only a bit of the way into the mountains of Tennessee before the truck started to sputter. Dean pulled it off to the side of the road again, climbed out, stretched and cracked his back and then headed back to unhitch the Impala. Sam followed after him silently, wishing Dean would take the goggles back off. They managed to get the Impala pointed downhill, and a few moments later they were coasting, Dean using the brakes only enough to keep them from flying off the road when they had to swing around an abandoned vehicle or swoop through a badly banked curve. It was a nice, long stretch at a decent grade, and Dean had the Impala doing almost sixty with no working engine whatsoever by the time the road bottomed out and started to climb again. He swung them seemingly effortlessly onto an exit ramp leading to a badly maintained two-lane blacktop and a single broken-down looking gas station.

The tiny road stretched into trees and nothingness in both directions. It, the overpass for the highway, and the gas station were the only hints of civilization around. Dean pulled the Impala in next to a pump, hit the brake, and sat for a moment, his fingers tapping gently on the wheel, his goggled gaze staring out the windshield at a half-rusted blue box labeled "ice" that squatted at the edge of the lot. Sam followed his gaze, then half-turned in the seat to look behind them, past the tubes and wires still sticking out of the trunk, toward the highway ramp.

He wondered if Dean had known this gas station was here. He wondered if he'd known there wouldn't be anything else.

Dean had liked the kids at the school, Sam had thought. He'd even been worrying that Dean would start plotting how to take them with them when they left. But as Dean looked at the gas station, his lips pressed together into a hard, prissy line, his entire body straining forward, fingers tap-tap-tapping away, he seemed relieved. Tense as hell, yes, but he'd been that way for months, now. Sam opened his mouth to ask, then closed it again.

"No garage," Dean said, after a long moment.

Sam shook his head. "No. But there's a snack shop."

Dean nodded and opened the door, stepping out and turning to lean his elbows on the roof without closing it.

"Won't be comfy," he said at length. "But this could be home. For a bit."

Sam said nothing. Dean thumped his open hand on the Impala's roof, then stepped back to close the door and headed for the snack shop.

Sam rolled his head on his neck, felt no change in the alignment of his spine, then opened his door and got out.

* * *

There was no point in checking the pumps. Like most modern gas stations, they were electrically operated, and the computer screens and digital meters were all dark. If there was any gas left here, they'd have to access the tanks directly, but Dean made no effort to do so. The snack shop still had plenty of bottles of motor oil and solvents along with the bags of chips, bottles of soda, and cases of beer. It was completely deserted, with only a single pile of white powder, perfectly lumped behind the counter. They left it undisturbed. No point in stirring up any ghosts, here, if they didn't have to.

With no garage, Dean worked on the Impala outside, in the sun and the heat. With no showers, he splashed himself clean in the tiny, grimy men's room once a day. With no bed -- or costumes, for that matter -- he stretched out on the floor in the back of the shop, next to a refrigerator and an ATM, his leather jacket draped over his gun serving as a pillow.

They'd slept in worse places, but not many of them and not for very long. Sam seemed better off, since he didn't need to sleep, as far as either of them could tell. He didn't need to eat, though when he was solid, he breathed and had a pulse. He didn't tell Dean what he did while his brother slept. It was just one of the many, many things he didn't think Dean would want to know.

Sam pointed out, early on, that there had to be a town or something, somewhere close by. A place with beds and changes of clothing, more food and showers. It was a moot point, though; the road went uphill in all directions. They didn't have the propulsion to get the Impala going, Dean wasn't going anywhere without his car, and Sam decided, after the incident at the school, that he wasn't going anywhere without his brother, so they both remained at the gas station. Dean tinkered the days away on the Impala and spent his evenings going over his plans for her by candle light. Sam alternated his time between standing on the side of the highway overpass, trying to see as far as he could in either direction, and hanging around Dean, watching him work, and resisting the urge to remind him that what he was doing was impossible.

He was doing the former when the beat-up silver "New Beetle" came coughing and chugging down the highway from the west. He straightened from his slouch against the guard-rail and lifted a hand in greeting, walking up the shoulder towards it. It screeched to a halt, its engine whining, and swung sideways, its window rolling down. The woman behind the wheel had a wide-eyed glare and a pistol fixed on Sam.

Sam had just enough time to wonder what it might feel like to get shot in his current state before she pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Well. Something happened. The car stopped, for one, after spinning another thirty-some degrees, and the woman driving it started cursing not so much fluently as repetitively, and Sam jumped back from the shoulder and decided it might be a good idea to be somewhere else. But the gun never went off.

* * *

Two minutes later, Sam was next to Dean by the Impala, and the Beetle was rolling down the wrong ramp from the highway, then careening over the bare strip of dry grass that separated the gas station lot from the road. It wrenched to a halt a few feet from the pumps, and Dean straightened up, stepped back from his car, and wiped his hands on the sides of his jeans.

The woman sat behind the wheel of her car, beating on it with one open palm and clutching her gun in her other hand, staring forward through her windshield. Dean twisted his head to cast a glance at Sam, who remained steadfastly on the other side of the Impala from the woman, then shrugged, pulling his goggles down around his neck.

"No gas," he called to the woman, his hands loose and clearly empty by his sides. His t-shirt was drenched and sticky with sweat, clingy enough to clearly outline the hammer and two wrenches he had tucked into his waistband underneath it, as well as his gun, though that was at the small of his back and well out of her sight line. "Already checked. Sorry."

The woman stared at him, then flicked her gaze over towards Sam, her mouth tightening. She looked back to Dean and slowly raised her gun. Dean lifted his hands, the corner of his lips twitching upwards.

"That's not going to do you a lot of good."

"What, you're immune to bullets?" The woman scoffed.

Dean's smirk turned into a full blown grin. "Nah. But you've got the safety on."

The woman looked at her gun and started cursing, again. Dean half-turned back to Sam with a wave of his hand. Sam scowled and shook his head, standing his ground. But he didn't come any closer, and Dean supposed he'd have to make due with what he could get. He turned back to the woman. "I'm Dean."

"That's great," she said. She managed to flick the safety off and trained the gun on Dean again. "I know how to use this."

Dean wasn't so sure she did. "That's great," he parroted back at her. "How about you put it away? We're not going to hurt you."

"Bullshit," she said, her eyes flicking back to Sam. "It's _him._"

Dean sighed. "His name's Sam."

"I don't care."

"Then leave."

"I can't."

"We don't have any gas," Dean said again.

"I'm not looking for gas." She cocked her head toward the back of her car, the gun wavering. "I need grease."

Dean frowned and sniffed the air. Got a nose full of french fries and exhaust. "You're running on grease?"

"Biodiesel."

"We don't have any of that, either."

"Fuck."

That seemed to pretty well sum it up.

* * *

Her name was April. She was a forty-three year old science teacher and mother of two from Nashville, and she was the only person she knew who'd survived.

Dean got that much from her, and her out of her car, only when Sam promised to keep his distance and went to go hang out by the store -- far enough away, apparently, that she felt safe, but close enough for him to listen in on their conversation and hopefully put a stop to things if they started to go pear-shaped. He crossed his arms as Dean tried telling her Sam was harmless. She apparently wasn't listening.

"I saw him," she insisted. "When it -- I saw him." Sam tensed, wondering what she was talking about.

Dean nodded, then shrugged. "He doesn't know."

_Doesn't know what?_ Sam narrowed his eyes at Dean, but continued to keep back. _What haven't you told me, Dean?_ It was a stupid question, of course. He and Dean barely talked about anything, anymore.

"How could --" April cut herself off, her eyebrows lowered, her chin jutting out.

Dean shrugged again. "He just doesn't."

April leaned back against her car. Her gun was still clutched in one hand, but she finally put the safety back on, and Sam let himself relax, slightly. She gave Dean a measuring look. "You saw him, too."

Dean nodded. Sam fumed. _Saw me _what_?_

"Then why are you still with him?"

"He's my brother."

"Some brother."

"Only one I got." April looked down and away, and Sam heard Dean sigh. "Look. We don't have any gas. We don't have any" he let out another hard breath and scowled, like he couldn't believe the word he was about to use, "grease. But I'm pretty good with engines. Maybe we can figure something out for you."

"I'm not letting him near me."

"I'm not asking you to."

"As soon as I get some fuel, I'm out of here."

Dean nodded. "Honestly, that's probably for the best."

"Is that a threat?"

Dean looked at her. "No. Just the truth."

She nodded, then. "You keep him on a leash."

Sam bristled, tempted to storm over, now that the gun wasn't an issue, but held himself back. Dean laughed. "I've been tryin' my whole life. I'll do my best."

April was silent for a long moment, looking Dean over. She lowered her chin and raised it once in a nod. "What have you got then?"

Dean licked his lips, turning his face skyward, then smiled. "Beer and wine, mostly. Some chips and soda. And half a steam engine."

"Well." April sighed. "I guess that's a start."

Sam let out a slow, silent breath, cringing inwardly at the thought of her sticking around, a not-entirely-new jealousy bubbling up in his chest. Still, Dean had said more in the few minutes since April arrived than he had in the last several months with just Sam. If she would keep Dean happy -- or as close to happy as either of them seemed to get, these days -- Sam supposed he could put up with her. He eased the door to the shop open and slipped inside, taking up a post near the window where he could keep an eye on things.

He could keep himself "on a leash", thank you very much.

* * *

"This is. . . ." April stared at what Dean had so far of his steam engine. Dean looked as well, his mouth curved into a fond smile, his fingers crumpling and recrumpling a rag.

"Pretty awesome, right?"

"Is that a trumpet?"

"Last place we holed up was an old school."

"A trumpet." She leaned in closer, brushing dirty fingers along the bell of the instrument, tracing the curve of it back to where it was fused to the rest of the engine. "It's welded in."

"Seemed to have a lower melting point than most of what I work with."

She nodded. "It would. That's not necessarily a good thing. You were lucky the school had an auto shop."

Dean frowned. "It, uh. It didn't."

"You had to get the torch from somewhere."

"Made one."

"You made a welding torch. Out of what?"

"Paint sprayer and some solvents."

"A paint sprayer."

"Uh." Dean shrugged. "Yeah."

"You turned a paint sprayer into a blow torch."

Dean took a step backwards, dropping the rag. "Uh, yes."

"The amount of pressure required to propel the 'solvents', not to mention finding one that would burn at the right temperature. . . ." She spoke in a low tone, shaking her head as she stared at his engine. Finally, she looked up, her expression skeptical. "It's ridiculous. Impossible. You expect me to believe that you created that weld," she pointed at the trumpet, "using what essentially amounts to a lit can of hairspray?"

Dean frowned and shrugged. "Yeah, I guess."

The gun came out again, and Dean sighed, lifting his hands. "Either you're lying to me, and I don't see what that would get you, or you're some kind of -- like that fucking brother of yours --"

"Hey, lady, that 'fucking brother of mine' happens to agree with you --"

"What are you?!" She was shouting, now, emphasizing her words with her gun, and Dean was pretty sure he was about to die. No one with any clue how to use a gun would be holding it the way she was holding hers, and people with guns who didn't know how to use them properly scared the shit out of him.

"Woah, hey, Jesus." Dean backed up a step, hands still out and open. "Put that thing down, would you? I'm not -- I'm just a guy."

"Bullshit," she said, the gun in her hand shaking. Dean swallowed. "Stop. Stop lying to me. You're traveling around with him and you tell me you made that and you expect me to believe you're normal? That's impossible. People don't -- fire doesn't -- _why them?_"

Dean blinked. "Uh. What?"

"Why them? David and Antonia were good kids! Why them? Why not me? Why did this happen?"

He swallowed again, something catching in his throat. He kept his hands up, but dropped his chin and lowered his voice. "I don't know."

"Bullshit."

"I don't know!" Dean shouted it this time. "Do you think I wanted any of this? I don't know why you didn't die. I don't know why they did. I don't know why any of this is happening or how I can --" he gestured uselessly with one hand toward the Impala. "I just don't know, okay?" He shut his eyes, fisting his hands in the air without dropping them, as though they could somehow block a bullet if she got around to pulling the trigger. He shook his head and opened his eyes wide at her again, keeping his posture defensive, despite the instinct to pull his own weapon.

"Please." He poured all of it, all the fear he wouldn't let himself recognize, the grief over every single person he hadn't been able to save, into the one word. "Please, enough people have died."

She stared at him, the gun shaking, her mouth pressed into a thin line, the folds around her mouth standing out in stark relief. "I should kill you."

Dean didn't say anything. He wondered if he agreed with her.

She dropped the gun.

Dean's legs gave out, and he sat down hard on the asphalt, scraping his palms and letting out the breath he didn't know he was holding in a heavy rush. She crumpled a moment later, her arms wrapping over her stomach, her expression collapsing in grief as she curled up into a ball next to the Impala.

* * *

Sam stood -- hovered, practically -- inside the shop, staring out the window at April and Dean, his eyes focused intently on April's gun. He could feel energy gathering around him as he watched her wave the weapon at his brother. Company or not, this couldn't happen. The air in the shop crackled, kicking up into a light breeze, but Sam ignored it, his entire focus on the woman threatening Dean. His mouth fell open before he realized what he was doing, and started to shape Dean's name --

And April dropped the gun and she and Dean both sat down on the pavement, and Sam snapped his mouth shut. The air in the shop settled, humidity seeping back in through the badly insulated doors and windows. Ten minutes later, when Dean came in to grab a case of beer, Sam was just as he had always been -- at least over the last few months. Quiet, cautious, and slightly bewildered, but harmless.

Neither of them quite realized what had nearly happened, what _would_ have happened if April hadn't dropped that gun.

* * *

"I wanted to work for NASA," April said, staring into her can of beer.

It was night, but they were still outside, sitting propped up against her Beetle, a case of beer between them. Dean could see Sam, sometimes, watching them through the glass door of the snack shop, but he didn't come outside and April wouldn't go inside, not even for the bathroom.

At least she didn't seem to want to kill them, any more.

"That's cool," Dean said, passing his own beer can from hand to hand, watching it reflect the moonlight. In the darkness, she was little more then a silhouette, hunched over with her knees drawn up towards her head.

"I was good enough," she said. "I was really good, with chemistry and with physics. That's how I know, about your car."

"Why didn't you?" He kept his voice low, looked out across the lot to the snack shop. Sam had a few candles lit for Dean when he eventually came in. They cast strange shadows through the windows, made Sam's tall form seem leaner and more unearthly as he watched them.

"I." She took a gulp of beer, finishing the can, then dented it with her thumb and crushed it against the pavement. "I got pregnant."

Dean nodded. "Your kids?"

"David and Antonia. David was older, by about seven minutes. I'd show them off, but I don't have any pictures." She folded her arms across her chest again. It was a warm night, but Dean knew that ghosts, even the ones that lived in memories, brought a chill. "It was too hard. Afterwards, I couldn't see their faces without remembering. So I left it all behind."

Dean nodded. "My dad, uh. He was the same way." She lifted her head, and he shrugged, looking down at his beer. "Our mom -- mine and Sam's -- she died when Sam was just a baby. A fire."

"Did he --"

"No." Dean's cheeks tightened, his lips tense. "No, nothing like that. It was, uh. They said it was bad wiring."

"They said."

"Yeah."

"What happened to David and Antonia wasn't bad wiring."

"No."

"Spontaneous human combustion."

"I know."

"We were eating dinner. A late one. Antonia had a game in the afternoon. Field hockey. Her team won. And. I was just. I asked for the gravy. And there was --"

"You don't have to," Dean cut in.

"I want to."

Dean swallowed. He didn't want to hear it, what it was like for her. But maybe he had to. "Yeah. Okay."

"There was a light. Like nothing I'd ever seen. It didn't come in the windows or from the chandelier or anything, it was just there. And I couldn't see anything, but I felt this heat and I saw him, his face, his mouth open like he was shouting for something and then they started screaming."

There was a sharp crackle of aluminum and a pain in Dean's palm. He'd crumpled his beer can. He coughed, then threw it out across the lot, listening to it clack as it hit.

"You shouldn't do that. You should recycle it."

"Who's left to care?"

"Just because the world's half-dead doesn't mean we get to kill it the rest of the way."

Dean shook his hand out. The aluminum hadn't cut him. He pushed himself to his feet. "Whatever. We should get some sleep."

"I'm not going in there."

Dean nodded, looking up at the sky. There were more stars there than he remembered ever seeing before, even in the most remote parts of the country. Dean thought about the stories of dead souls becoming stars. "Yeah," he said. His voice rasped in his own ears. "I know."

* * *

April slept in her car. Sam had to admit, that impressed him. Beetles weren't exactly known for being spacious, and while she certainly was no Amazon, she wasn't exactly petite, either. But she'd insisted, so Sam watched as she and Dean pushed the car around to the other side of the building, where it wouldn't be visible from the road. Dean came back in briefly for a large bag of rock salt, then returned with the bag still full. Sam raised his eyebrows.

"She wouldn't let me," Dean said by way of explanation. "I'm not sure what she's thinking."

Sam could guess. The woman, as far as he could tell, had had no interaction with the supernatural before. Scientists could be the easiest to convince, but only when there was direct, observable evidence in front of them.

He didn't like her staying there, and said as much as Dean settled himself down on the flattened cardboard boxes he'd set up in the back corner to serve as his mattress. Dean pulled off his goggles, setting them close at hand, and lay back, one hand between the back of his head and the folded leather jacket.

"Not like she's got anywhere else to go," Dean pointed out.

"She tried to kill you."

"She's more interested in killing you."

"I can handle a bullet."

"We don't know that."

Sam sighed, sitting up against the ATM near Dean's head, one knee pulled up, his hands folded over it. "We know I'd probably take it better than you," he said.

Dean grunted and shut his eyes, as though that could put an end to the conversation. And normally, it might. For all the time they'd spent together recently, they spent very, very little of it just talking.

"Dean."

Dean grunted again, half-questioning.

"She's scared of me."

"Scared of both of us."

"She had a beer with you. She won't go near me."

"You're pretty freaky."

"The kids at the school were scared of me, too."

"Mmm." It wasn't a confirmation, but it wasn't a denial, either.

"Dean."

"What, Sammy?"

"What happened?"

Dean opened his eyes, frowning up at Sam in the candle light. Sam refolded his hands across his knee with an awkward shrug.

"I mean, to everything."

"You don't remember." It wasn't entirely a question. Wasn't entirely a statement.

"No. I mean, sort of, but." He leaned forward, resting his chin on his hands and closing his eyes, wishing he could sleep. Wishing he knew if he could shut himself off without disappearing completely. He breathed. His heart beat. But he wasn't sure he was alive, any more.

"We were in Florida. Jacksonville." Dean said. Sam could feel him watching him. He nodded.

"I remember that."

"Ruby showed up."

He remembered that, too. Ruby, looking as pissed as she had when she found out they'd lost the Colt. As pissed as she'd been when she made them watch the news broadcast about the jail in Colorado. He couldn't remember what she'd been pissed about.

"She, uh." He heard Dean shift. "She wasn't alone."

"Lilith?"

"I guess."

"Then what?"

"I don't know. We were penned in. There was a bunch of them. And the girl. Lilith's a kid, you remember that, right?"

Sam nodded, and though he wasn't sure if Dean could see him do it, Dean went on.

"The kid's eyes went white. And so did everything else. You shouted my name."

"It was hot."

"Yeah. I don't know what happened after that. Just, awhile later, the demons were gone. And so were most of the people. And you were. . . ."

Sam remembered that. Remembered Dean, curled against a wall, covered in white powder, staring at him. Remembered trying to ask what was wrong, remembered Dean reaching out to him and reaching _through_ him. Remembered standing in a bathroom, staring into a mirror, and seeing someone else reflected back at him, simply because he didn't want to be "Sam", anymore.

"Yeah," he said, his voice strangled by a tightening in his throat that he couldn't quite feel.

"Hey." Dean's hand landed on his shin, and Sam opened his eyes, looking down at his brother. Dean gave his shin a small squeeze. "We're alive, dude. You and me. Whatever else is happening, that's still what's important. We -- you just -- adapted. That's all."

Sam nodded slowly, though he didn't believe it. Didn't believe that Dean believed it. "Get some sleep, dude. You've got a crazy chick in a fuckin' Beetle to deal with, tomorrow."

Dean huffed a laugh, smiled without humor. "Yeah. She fuckin' criticized my steam engine, too."

"That bitch," Sam said softly. "Only I'm allowed to do that."

"Damn straight," Dean replied, just as softly. He shifted again, rolling onto his side, the hand not on Sam's shin still tucked under his head. "You stickin' around?"

"Yeah, dude." Sam slid his foot over a few inches and watched as Dean shifted again, laying the side of his head on the toe of Sam's sneaker. Sam closed his eyes and concentrated on making the sneaker, along with his foot, larger and softer, and Dean mumbled a soft thanks.

Feet weren't great pillows. But they beat the hell out of pistols.

* * *

April was more willing to listen, the next morning. More willing to accept what Dean could do without as many questions. They ate cold pop-tarts for breakfast, sitting against her Beetle, while Sam hung back, out of sight. They discussed the probability of being able to adapt her biodiesel engine to run on beer and wine, which mostly got slightly hysterical laughter out of her, and a broad grin in return out of Dean. After breakfast, she offered to help him out a bit with his steam engine, and they tried to work out the best ways to balance the needs for efficiency and power, what fuels would burn the best and the longest. April's expression got more and more bemused with each of Dean's suggestions and theories, and downright bewildered at the handful of notes he showed her.

"It's basic mechanics, right?" Dean shoved his hands in his pockets, frowning at her expression. "All this crap has been figured out before."

"Do you actually have any idea how a steam engine works?"

"Mostly."

She stared at him, shaking her head, then turned to look over what he'd done so far. "You're some kind of mechanical genius, you know that? And you're working on a steam engine. For all I know, you could build a nuclear reactor out of duct tape and paper clips. And you're working on a technology that was perfected in 1914."

"You done?"

"No! You're building a damned Stanley Steamer out of an orchestra pit."

"The steam's gotta come out through something."

At which point, April threw her hands into the air with a huff of frustration and stormed off.

* * *

"Nuclear power is basically giant steam engines using radioactive material for heat," Sam pointed out when Dean came into the shop for some water.

"Can it, Sammy."

"I'm just saying."

"Yeah, well. Don't tell her that."

Sam wasn't going to. Sam didn't plan on telling April much of anything.

* * *

The trouble was, where Dean's education in mechanics was entirely hands on, April's was almost entirely theoretical. So while Dean just knew he could make it work eventually, April had to make all the numbers and charts and math and previous knowledge match up. She just couldn't explain how Dean was managing to slap this thing together on the fly.

Of course she also couldn't explain the spontaneous combustion of her children at the dinner table, burned up from the inside, leaving behind white powdered ash and not a hint of a scorch mark. But she didn't say it, and he didn't call her on it. He just shrugged, when she finally made her way back from her sulk, offered her a bottle of water, and said "I think I can make it work."

She gave a very small nod and wiped at her forehead.

"Well. Think your weird science can distill me some vegetable oil from some bags of corn chips?"

"Either that or some seriously horrible moonshine," Dean said, still holding out the water.

She nodded and took the bottle. "Ethanol. Even better. Guess we've got work to do."

* * *

Sam resented April. He resented that she and Dean could stand outside, leaning over their cars and talking shop, but that if he tried to join them, she might panic and hurt Dean. He resented that it took her showing up to get Dean really talking about things that mattered again. He resented that she looked at the caterpillar treads, so far still only operational in concept, and called them "genius". He resented that she and Dean could laugh, when he and Dean hadn't been able to since Jacksonville.

But he stayed out of their way. Kept back and only watched. And hoped she'd leave, soon.

* * *

The still was mostly successful, though the first batch of "fuel" they got from it refused to burn. It took two weeks to construct, two weeks of Dean sleeping on his pallet in the snack shop and April sleeping in her Beetle behind the building. Dean kept offering to circle it with salt, but April continued to refuse. She could handle the steam engine and the still, but only barely, she said. She couldn't handle ghosts that were afraid of condiments.

It was early September when April decided she wanted to try their latest batch of "fuel" in her car. Dean tried to talk her out of it, and Sam wondered if maybe he was starting to grow attached to her. If he wasn't enough company for his outgoing, gregarious brother. If Dean wanted to sleep with her. She was the only other person they'd seen since the school -- no one else had come trundling down the road. Even the wildlife they only encountered in brief snatches: a hint of movement in the trees, a squirrel making a hasty run across the road before vanishing into the bushes. It had been five months since Jacksonville, when the world as they'd known it had ended, and Sam knew that he, for one, was getting very lonely. April was willing to let him closer, these days, but still refused to look at him or talk to him. He could come out of the snack shop, but couldn't cross the pavement to where she and Dean were working. Close enough to hear their conversations, but not close enough to join in.

He was sitting on the hood of the Impala, looking through a couple of their old books while she poured the modified corn oil into the Beetle's gas tank, thinking that at least once she'd gone, he and Dean could get to a long overdue cleaning of their weaponry. The air was cooler than it had been, and Dean had his leather jacket on over his t-shirt and his goggles over his eyes against the still-bright sunlight, and Sam couldn't tell what he was thinking. It seemed to be getting harder to tell even without the goggles, these days.

"Where are you going to go?" Dean asked April.

"I've got -- I _had_ -- some relatives in Virginia. My cousin, his family. I have to see if they made it through.

Dean nodded. "I'd tell you to call me and let me know, but, uh."

"Yeah. Think it's gonna be a little while before we have enough infrastructure for even a mail service." She finished fueling the car and straightened. "I guess I'm never going to see you again."

Dean shrugged. "Dunno. I've known weirder shit to happen."

"Like your steam engine."

"Don't knock the steam engine."

She laughed softly, and suddenly pulled Dean into a hug. Sam winced, his fingers tightening on the pages of his book until the paper started to tear. He took a deep breath, smelled nothing, and willed himself to calm down. Dean hugged her back, just for a moment, then stepped away, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

"Be careful," he said.

"You, too." She flashed him a small grin, then turned and suddenly looked right at Sam. Sam stiffened. Her mouth was tight, but she raised one hand in what might have been a wave. "And you, Sam."

It was the first words she'd said to him since she'd cursed him out on the side of the highway. She didn't seem sure whether or not she meant it, but Sam nodded back, careful to keep his anger and resentment off his face. She wasn't a bad person, he knew that. She was scared and she was dealing with the situation they were in in the only way she knew how. He had to respect that, however grudgingly. Lord knew there were worse ways she could have responded.

She reached out to pat Dean on the arm once, then climbed into the car. Dean took several steps backwards, his hands still in his pockets, and watched with a hard expression as she spent a few moments adjusting various things in the car, then raised her keys in a jingling wave and lowered them to the ignition. There was a churning chug, an electronic *ding* warning her to put on her seatbelt, and then a firm growl.

And then the Beetle exploded.


	3. Chapter 3

_Chapter Three_

Steam technology is the difference between the nerd and the  
mad scientist; steampunk machines are real, breathing, coughing,  
struggling and rumbling parts of the world. They are not the airy  
intellectual fairies of algorithmic mathematics but the hulking  
manifestations of muscle and mind, the progeny of sweat, blood,  
tears and delusions. The technology of steampunk is natural; it  
moves, lives, ages and even dies.

-- "What then, is Steampunk?: Colonizing the Past so we can  
Dream the Future" by the Catastrophone Orchestra and Arts  
Collective (NYC), SteamPunk Magazine issue 1

* * *

_She pauses, then, to pour herself another whiskey, and you find yourself holding your breath. You don't understand everything she's telling you, though you're keeping notes as best you can anyway. The way she's telling the story has cast a spell over the bar, one that has sucked you in completely._

_If it weren't for the whiskeys and the turning of the pages in your journal, it would seem as though time itself has ceased to exist for you two._

_She drinks the fresh whiskey slow, her eyes on the scarred wood of the bar, as though she has no idea of your impatience. Once her glass is empty, she sets it down, raises her eyes, and continues._

* * *

Sam sat there for a moment, watching the fireball that had just before been a silver Beetle rise into the air and reshape itself into flames. He couldn't see anything but that fire for a long moment, couldn't hear anything but its roar, feel anything but the numbness that had set in in Florida. Then a cold hand seemed to reach into his chest and squeeze his lungs and he realized that Dean had been standing near the car when it had gone up. He scrambled across the hood to his feet, the book he'd been reading dropping unceremoniously to the ground, and hurried forward.

The heat of the flames didn't bother him, but he raised an arm to shield his eyes from it out of habit, searching for his brother. He found Dean by tripping over him, far enough from the car to have avoided catching any of the flame itself, but close enough to have been blown over by the blast. Close enough to have caught the shrapnel.

Dean was crumpled over, on his back with his head turned to one side, goggles keeping Sam from seeing if his eyes were closed or open. His legs were twisted beneath him, knees sticking up slightly into the air and pointed toward one side, one arm flung up, over his head, the other stretched out on the pavement. His mouth hung open slightly, and Sam couldn't bring himself to move until he saw that Dean was still breathing.

The leather jacket seemed to have caught most of the shrapnel, small shards of glass and larger bits of silver-painted metal slashed and gouged into the brown material. One especially large, sharp piece stuck straight up out of the side of the jacket, just below Dean's ribs, and Sam's hands, when he touched it, came back bloody. A closer inspection, well-lit by the fire burning brightly behind him, showed to Sam's relief that the piece had only grazed Dean, opening a long, shallow cut along his side. Similar cuts decorated Dean's legs and arms, the sides of his face. The worst seemed to be a gouge that ran up into Dean's hairline, and another across his cheekbone that led in a straight path to a small, pie-piece-shaped chunk taken out of the outer curve of Dean's ear.

Nothing life threatening, he hoped. Bad enough to hurt, bad enough to scar and even, in the case of that ear, maim. Dean's face was red, like he'd been sunburned, his lips looked slightly swollen, and when Sam lifted his head to run his hand along the side, behind his uninjured ear, Dean let out a short, soft moan.

"Dean." It was a demand. Sam took him by the shoulders and pressed down, shaking him gently. "Dean. Can you hear me?"

Dean's lips moved a fraction, but no sound came out. Sam cursed, looked back towards the flaming remains of the car. He could just make out the black silhouette of the Beetle's frame, a hunched shape behind the wheel. There was no way April could have survived.

He had to get Dean out of there. The snack shop had a first aid kit, enough to supplement some of the supplies they kept in the Impala, but Dean was going to need stitches and antibiotics and, he realized, as Dean lifted his head a few inches off the ground in a ragged, painful sounding cough, oxygen.

He had to get him to a hospital. He pressed down on Dean's shoulders again, holding him still as his brother coughed. "Dean. I need you to answer me."

Dean choked out something that sounded like "Sammy", and Sam nodded.

"That's it, man. I need your help." He reached up to pull the goggles down around Dean's neck and caught sight of his confused gaze. "You with me?"

Dean nodded slightly, cringing and then bursting into another round of coughing, but his eyes focused on Sam's.

"I need to get you out of here. You're pretty beat up, dude."

"Should see the other guy," Dean mumbled. Sam grinned ruefully.

"Other guy's obliterated, man."

Dean frowned. "April?"

Sam shook his head. "She's gone."

Dean closed his eyes. "Fuck."

"Does the Impala work?"

Dean's eyes flashed open again. "What?"

"I need to get you to a hospital. She's the only transportation we got. I need to know if she's working."

Dean bent upwards with the force of another cough, then nodded slightly. "Can't get far. But she won't let us down."

Sam nodded, then shifted carefully to gather Dean up in his arms.

"Can walk."

"Too bad." Sam lifted, and Dean didn't even struggle. Sam put as much speed into his stride as he could. "No arguing."

"Yeah," Dean said on a rasping sigh. "'Kay."

* * *

_Hot as fuck_, Dean decided, as he lay across the front seat of the Impala, his head cushioned on Sam's ginormous thigh, didn't even begin to describe it.

He hadn't been kidding when he'd told Sam that the Impala wouldn't let them down. But he also hadn't been kidding about her not getting them far, mostly because there was still an issue with leaking steam and overheating that hadn't been solved, yet.

There were thin tendrils of steam leaking in through the vents in the dash, more filling the backseat, though, thankfully, most of it was erupting in clouds from the trumpet bell on the back of the engine in a high-pitched wail. Still, Dean was sweating enough to feel large, individual drops trickling across his face and burning in the cuts and scratches that seemed to cover most of his body, and he was phasing in and out of consciousness as Sam drove, fading out into a light daze when the pounding in his head got too much, only to wake himself back up with racking coughs and gasps for air.

He was pretty sure he'd never be cold again.

Sam had all the windows open to try and relieve some of the heat, one hand pressed to Dean's chest to keep him from flinging himself forward off the seat with his coughing. He was speaking, a rapid, continuous babble in a reassuring voice that Dean couldn't quite make heads or tails of, but probably had to do with how close the hospital would be, and how soon he would have Dean sewn back together.

He certainly felt like he was falling apart.

The Impala was rattling and coughing and rumbling loud enough that Dean thought, in his more lucid moments, that he could actually hear which parts of the engine were working and which parts needed more work. The steam was getting caught up somewhere before hitting the pistons, causing the engine to nearly stall a few times as they chugged far too slowly up the mountain road, building up only to be released with a heaving hiss that seemed to be coordinated with Dean's own bouts of coughing, as if the two of them had fused together somewhere down the line, as if the engine was as clogged and aching as Dean's lungs were. The mechanical coughing, and the steam, let up as Sam crested the peak of the road and started downhill, picking up speed, and Dean felt some of the ache in his own chest ease along with it.

_I'm one with the car,_ he thought, a little insanely, and must have said it out loud, because Sam's fingers tightened in his t-shirt and Dean caught his gaze for a moment. Sam shook his head, and Dean tried for a smile, felt his tight skin protest the movement, and bit back a groan.

"If you can be one with the Force, Sammy," he gasped, his speech garbled even to his own ears, "I can be one with my baby."

He thought Sam said something about him being an idiot, then, and they started turning, and Dean caught sight of a blue highway sign whipping by through the steam, the white "H" seeming to swerve and swirl for a moment before they were past it.

The Impala sputtered, and Sam took his hand off Dean's chest for a moment to rub it against the dashboard, his encouraging babble taking on a slightly panicked tone, and Dean let himself slip away again, content that, for now, Sam had things under control.

* * *

They made it to the hospital on gasps and fumes, but Sam had already decided he was never going to criticize Dean's bizarrely effective grasp of Victorian mechanics again. He'd expected, every time the engine stalled or sputtered, for the Impala to go the way of April's Beetle, for Dean to be reduced to something like the white powder that seemed to cover half the country, these days. He'd be alone, then, in this half-existence. And he knew he wouldn't be able to handle that.

But they made it. Dean was sweating like he'd been in a sauna, and Sam was having trouble seeing through the windshield, but by some miracle the Impala had made it right up to the emergency room doors, and Sam gave her a final pat and a prayer of thanks before gathering Dean up and pulling him from the car.

Dean was unconscious again, limp and heavy in Sam's arms, but Sam willed himself to be strong enough to carry him, willed his arms to be soft enough not to cause him any more pain as he did, and he strode up to the hospital doors like he could take on the world.

Maybe he could, too. He couldn't, how ever, make automatic doors work with no electricity.

_Fuck._

He kicked at the glass a few times, watching the doors shudder without breaking, and thought about screaming.

Dean stirred in his arms, blinked blearily at what Sam was doing, then mumbled "side door". Sam blinked and looked to his left and right.

The automatic, sliding doors were flanked on either side by ones with traditional handles. He was a complete idiot. He juggled Dean around carefully for a moment, ignoring the half-stuttered protests to put him down and let him walk, then managed to wrap one hand around the handle and tug the door open, turning both of them sideways to step through.

The emergency room was dark, lit only by the sunlight coming in through the doors and windows, but Dean relaxed enough in Sam's arms for him to assume it was blessedly cool. The plastic chairs crowded into the waiting area were scattered, some of them toppled. Several held piles of ash, and Sam forced himself to turn away from them. The front desk was, of course, abandoned, but a stretcher was lying on its side a few feet beyond it, so Sam propped Dean carefully against the counter and held him up with one hand while he reached over to drag it upright.

"Just hang on, Dean," he said, the same mantra he'd repeated over and over in the car on the drive from the gas station to the hospital. "I'll have you fixed up in no time, just hang on."

"I'm hangin', dude," Dean answered, his tongue stumbling over the words, and he broke into another round of coughing before Sam managed to scoop him up again and lay him on the stretcher. "Just don' make me wear one of them crappy gowns."

Sam's lip twitched, and he nodded. "I'll see what I can do."

He pushed the stretcher through the double doors that lead into the emergency room proper, leaving Dean in the middle of the floor where he'd be the most visible as he rushed around, gathering up supplies.

Most of the equipment was useless, of course, and Sam found himself cursing the trend toward computerization that had left him and his brother high and dry so many times since Jacksonville. He managed to locate an oxygen tank that seemed to be full enough to be useful, and grabbed a plastic wrapped oxygen mask, wasting a few precious seconds figuring out how to connect the hose from the mask to the nozzle on the tank, then a few more before he got the tank open and heard the tell-tale hiss of escaping gas. He hurried back over to Dean with it, fitting the mask over his brother's face, and hoping that the application of oxygen to treat smoke inhalation wasn't any more complicated than that. He gathered several suture kits and gauze packs next, and rolled a cart up to Dean's side, before looking his brother over again.

"Can you get your jacket off?" Dean wouldn't forgive him easily for cutting it.

Dean nodded slowly and reached one hand up to hold the oxygen mask in place as he struggled to sit up. Sam immediately reached out to help him, feeling the bits of glass still lodged into the leather pressing into the skin of his fingers, though it didn't cut him.

The t-shirt was the next to go. That, Sam had no trouble cutting off. T-shirts were pretty easy to come by, these days. He half suspected that, ultimately, Dean would end up working out how to get the Impala running on t-shirts. The jeans he hesitated over for a few moments before deciding that they'd be a loss either way. They were the same pair Dean had been wearing almost non-stop for the last few months, and even without the slashes and bloodstains, they were caked with grease and mud. Once he had Dean stripped, Sam set out cleaning the blood and soot from his chest and face, working carefully around the oxygen mask which Dean was still clinging too. The worst damage seemed to be the slash under his ribs and the cuts on his forehead, cheekbone, and ear.

"You want anesthetic?"

"Just fuggin' do it." Dean mumbled behind the mask, his eyes closed.

Sam swallowed, nodded, and set to work.

Dean passed out not long after.

Once the stitches were done, Sam finally rolled the stretcher into one of the curtained off cubicles. He woke Dean up long enough to get some pills and water into him, not wanting to have to worry about an IV if he didn't absolutely have to, then let his brother pass out again as he applied a thin layer of aloe over the red patches on his face. Dean looked ridiculous, lying naked on the stretcher next to a dingy-looking hospital bed, bristling with small, black stitches, his face faintly glistening, his eyes circled by pale, untouched skin, thanks to the goggles which still hung, along with his amulet, around his neck. Sam had loosened them so they wouldn't be pressing onto Dean's windpipe, but somehow couldn't bring himself to take them off. Sam pulled up a chair and flopped back into it, feeling emotionally drained even while, physically, he felt fine. He settled in for the long haul, keeping his eyes intent on Dean, watching for any sign of infection or fever.

When he'd hoped that April would go away, he'd never intended for her to take his brother with her.

* * *

Sam didn't sleep. That was just a fact of his life, these days. He didn't sleep, didn't eat, didn't take a piss. Which meant he didn't have to get up from that chair next to Dean until Dean was ready to get up, himself.

So, really, he had absolutely no idea how the man in the green scrubs and lab coat managed to suddenly be standing by the side of Dean's stretcher.

It was night, by then, not that Sam had any trouble seeing in the dark, any more. His new body or whatever it was didn't seem to follow the laws of physics -- and yeah, he saw the irony in insisting that those laws apply to Dean and his car. His eyes were able to pick up even the tiniest amounts of light and adapt almost instantly.

So, no, the fact that the room was lit only by very dim light coming in through small windows placed high up on the walls couldn't be the reason that Sam hadn't noticed this guy approaching. Hadn't caught sight of him until he was stretching out a long-fingered hand to place the back of it against Dean's forehead.

A ghost. He had to be a ghost. Or a demon. Nothing human, which meant he definitely wasn't going to let this asshole touch Dean. Sam pushed himself sharply to his feet, willing his form to be as tall and intimidating as possible, and putting his hands on the edge of Dean's stretcher to loom over the man in the scrubs like the shadow of a monster in an old, silent film.

The man in the scrubs looked up at Sam and grinned. His teeth flashed, stubby and faintly discolored, in the dim light from the window. "Hi there," he said.

Sam stared. "Who the fuck are you and what do you want with my brother?" He shouted it almost before he had time to think, then wanted to curse himself for being so cliche. Especially when the man's grin only grew and he lay the back of his hand on Dean's head.

"He's got a fever."

"Don't touch him."

The man snatched his hand back, though his smile didn't dim. "He's all red. And warm. Got a fever."

Sam scowled. "He's burned. Who are you?"

"Chas," the man answered, raising a hand as though to tip a nonexistent hat. "Nice to meetcha."

Sam narrowed his eyes. "Christo."

The man's eyes remained a clear, pale blue, and he tilted his head. "That Hispanic?"

"Latin."

"Knew a Latin girl, once. She was one sweet piece of ass. Mind if I call you Chris for short?"

Sam tried to remember where they'd left the salt. He knew they had supplies in the Impala, but couldn't remember if he'd brought any into the hospital with them. Fucking stupid was what it was.

"Your friend's got a fever, Chris," the man -- Chas, apparently -- said, nodding down at Dean. "You should get him some ice."

It occurred to Sam that Chas, for whatever reason, wasn't afraid of him. Everyone, including the ghosts at the theater, near as he could tell, had been afraid of him. "What are you?" Chas looked at him and lifted his hands. Sam caught sight of a white, plastic bracelet around his wrist. "You're a patient?"

"Ice is good for fevers," Chas said, seemingly unconcerned, looking Dean over with wide, interested eyes. "Much better than tubes."

And Sam remembered that Dean was naked. His brother was lying naked and unconscious in an abandoned hospital and Sam hadn't seen this guy come in. "You need to leave."

"You want me to get the ice?"

"Leave."

Chas nodded. "I'll get the ice." He stepped back, half-turning toward the doors to the ER, then paused, looking back at Sam with that wide-eyed, almost hungry look. "I know you, you know."

Sam just glared, shifting to put himself between Chas and Dean. Chas nodded again, slowly.

"You're the Screamer," he said, and his teeth flashed, catching a stray beam of moonlight. He lifted his hands and clapped them together quickly four times, a tiny round of applause that made Sam wonder for the first time if he could get sick even when he didn't eat. "It was quite a show, Chris. Can't wait for the encore."

And then he turned and walked out with only a soft swish of his lab coat, a quiet scrape of his green, shapeless slippers on the linoleum.

Sam felt his arms start to shake where he had them braced against Dean's stretcher.

"Dude."

It was soft, but it made Sam jump. He spun around, swallowing a gasp, and saw that Dean's eyes were open, his hand shoving at the oxygen mask over his face. Sam reached over to pull the mask away completely, and tried to pretend his hand wasn't shaking.

"Dean."

A small smile tugged at the corners of Dean's lips. "Just our luck."

"What?"

"Whole hospital, and fugly crazy man survives. Couldn't find me one with a sexy nurse?"

Sam let out a sound that was half-way between a laugh and a sigh. "Shut up. Jerk."

* * *

Dean didn't have a fever. Sam found a disposable thermometer amongst the supplies that confirmed that. If any heat was coming off his forehead, it was from the burn, and nothing else.

"You're lucky, you know," Sam told him as he tossed the thermometer aside and slumped back into his chair. One of Dean's eyebrows, slightly singed, but miraculously still full, lifted a millimeter. "Considering the fucking conditions around here, you probably should have an infection."

"Germs're afraid of me."

"Right."

"You're just upset you don't get to cuddle me back to health."

"Yeah, Dean, that's exactly what's going on here."

"It totally is." Dean closed his eyes, making no effort yet to move from the stretcher. "Dude. Think you could find me some more pants before our new friend comes back with the ice?"

* * *

Sam moved Dean to the cleanest private room he could find and circled the bed with salt. And lined the doors and windows. And put a devil's trap on the ceiling, dug up a smudge stick of sage from the Impala, blessed the ensuite bathroom, and brought in so much weaponry that Dean's pillow was more metal than fluff before he was willing to leave his brother alone in the hospital for more than a few minutes at a time.

And despite all of that, Chas still managed to show up without warning, just suddenly being in the room when Dean was trying to sleep. This wasn't too much of a problem, really, because when Dean wasn't doped up on painkillers -- and it didn't take very long before he was refusing to even take aspirin -- he woke up the moment Chas's slippered feet scuffed over the salt line.

"Dude. Go 'way. I don't have a freakin' fever," Dean said, the first time it happened.

Chas only smiled, a little too broadly, his eyes a little too focused for it to be a really friendly expression. "I couldn't find any ice. Where'd Chris go?"

The eternal question. "His name's Sam."

"He told me it was Chris."

That was how most of their conversations went. He could never tell Chas anything he didn't want to hear.

* * *

Dean missed the high school. The hospital was a step up above the gas station in that it had far better bathing facilities, though that wasn't saying much, and many more useful bits of equipment that he could Macguyver into the Impala, but at least the ghosts there had been entertaining before they'd tried to kill him. The ones here, little more than shades and death-echoes, really, just shuffled around or ran back and forth pushing stretchers, and Dean had never been a big fan of medical dramas. The kids at the high school had never bothered him while he was working, either. Hell, they never came near the theater, if they could help it. Dean always had to go find them. Chas came to find him. All. The freakin'. Time.

Seriously, if it weren't for the fact that something like half the population of the country or more was already dead and those left were all just struggling to survive, he'd be tempted to kill him.

"You warm?"

"It's early September," Dean pointed out, not looking up from where he was leaning over the Impala's engine. Dammit, they couldn't leave until he got at least the venting issue fixed. Just the half an hour it'd taken to get to the hospital in the thing had nearly boiled him. He'd work so much better if Chas just went away. "Of course I'm fuckin' warm."

"You're still pink."

"What part of 'my face got burned when a car blew up in front of me' don't you understand, Chas?"

"I'll get you some ice."

Dean glanced up, staring at Chas through the green lenses of his goggles. Chas smiled at him. His teeth looked like he'd been knawing on seaweed for the last few hours or something, but he wasn't creeped out by Dean. The kids had been creeped out by the goggles. April had known exactly what they were for and was still creeped out by the goggles. Dean sighed and turned back to his work. "Sure, Chas. Go get me some ice."

Chas nodded and hurried off. He never found any. He was never going to find any. No electricity meant no refrigeration which meant, of course, no ice. But get him looking and he'd stay away for at least a couple of hours.

It was totally going to suck when the burn healed enough to not make him look like a lobster any more, though.

* * *

They couldn't get all the glass and metal out of Dean's leather jacket. Dean just shrugged and figured it looked more bad ass that way, anyway. The only clothing lying around the hospital was either the wrong size, blood-stained, or scrubs, so Dean was forced to wander around in thin cotton pants, either green or blue. He went through them at an almost ridiculous pace, burning or tearing holes in them as he worked, before Sam finally gave in and spent his copious amounts of free time stitching Dean's original pair of jeans back together, using bits and pieces of other clothing to fill in the holes. The end result more closely resembled a denim quilt than traditional jeans, but they protected Dean's legs far better than the scrub pants could, and Dean wore them with pride.

The skin on Dean's arms grew as red as his burned face, all the hair scorched off until about half-way up his forearms, before he gave in and started wearing the leather jacket when he was working, for protection. Sam found him a lead apron from the x-ray labs. Dean took it with a grunt of thanks, but never wore it. Damned thing was too heavy to wear while he was working.

The cuts from the shrapnel from April's car healed remarkably quickly. The one under his ribs grew inflamed for a few days, but easy access to antibiotics, kept cool and dry in the hospital's storage closets, kept it from getting bad. His ear developed a small blister, which he had to restrain himself from fingering several times a day. The hair that started to grow in on the cut on his head when it healed was silver, but the streak was only visible when the light hit it just right.

Chas eventually grew tired of the search for ice, accepted that Dean didn't have a fever, and settled in to watch Dean work, usually sitting on the curb beside the Impala, occasionally calling out nonsensical advice or arguing with unseen people. Sam took to hanging out on the car's other side. He didn't trust Chas with Dean.

They took the Impala for test drives, longer and longer forays into the surrounding town and out onto the highway as the weather cooled and Dean patched up the leaks.

The leaves on the mountain sides changed, fading from green to brilliant reds and oranges, bright yellows and dank browns.

No one else came to the hospital. Or if they did, Chas drove them off before Sam or Dean could ever see them.

* * *

It was mid-October, by Sam's best guess, when Dean finally announced that the Impala was ready for business.

"You're sure?"

"She's as done as I can make her, Sam."

"If it breaks down --"

"We'll stop wherever we are and fix her."

Sam shoved his hands into his pockets -- his jeans were eternally just on the right side of dingy, and had started to take on a bit of the patchwork pattern of Dean's -- and hunched his shoulders.

"Where are we gonna go?"

"Thought we could aim for Bobby's place."

"You don't think he survived, do you?"

Dean frowned, thumbs hooked into the brown leather tool belt they'd scavenged from a hardware store two towns over. He was as healthy as he was going to get and -- were it not for the scars, the reflection of the light off the bits of glass in his jacket, and the goggles -- he would have looked just as he always had, before half or more of the population had turned to ash. Sam wished the illusion could be complete. He'd take even an FBI manhunt over the strange silence of the world around them.

"We gotta try, Sam."

Sam nodded. They owed Bobby at least that much. "Are we gonna bring Chas?"

Dean bit his lip, ran a hand through his hair, cropped short and uneven by hospital scissors and occasional bursts of scorching heat from his blowtorch. "Dunno, man. Guess that's up to him, right?"

"We could take him along, drop him off when we find more people." _If_ they found more people.

It was getting harder and harder to believe that they would.

* * *

Chas didn't want to go.

Didn't want them to go, either.

He could have picked a better way to express that opinion.

"Dude, put it down."

Dean didn't know where he got the knife. It wasn't one of theirs, and it sure as hell didn't look like it belonged in a hospital. It was huge, almost like a cleaver, but serrated along one edge. A specialty blade, maybe, something Chas had picked up somewhere along the way, before they'd arrived. He was pretty sure the man hadn't left the hospital since they'd gotten there.

He hadn't had a whole lot of time to study the knife, of course, not visually. But he could sure as hell feel the length and style of the blade. Chas had it pressed up against his collar bone, under the edge of his jacket.

They were in Dean's room, the one that Sam had brought him to when they finished in the ER. Dean had actually come back up looking for Chas, to ask him if he wanted to go with them. He'd packed what little wasn't already in bags or in the Impala earlier that day. Chas had been waiting for him just inside the doorway and had him shoved up against the wall before Dean had even had time to react.

The man was frighteningly strong and surprisingly quick. And they'd already known he could move almost silently.

"Seriously, man, what are you doing?"

Chas smiled. The expression never failed to creep Dean out. "You were leaving."

"We were gonna take you with us."

He shook his head. "No. I have to be here. But everyone who comes is just like you. They stay and they talk and then they try to leave again. You can't leave." The blade pressed ever so slightly closer, and Dean tried to become one with the wall.

"Look, just chill out, right? Just put the knife down and we can talk about this."

"No. You two, you and your brother, you're the reason it all happened. And now you want to leave." Chas's eyes were unnaturally bright in the dim room. It was morning, but the blinds were pulled, casting striped shadows across his face. "I can't let you."

"Chas." That was Sam. Dean lifted his gaze to stare at his brother, warning him back with his eyes. Chas twisted his head and his body to look, but didn't let up on the knife. "Chas, calm down."

"Screamer." Chas shook his head. "Why don't you understand? The blood and the ash and the blood again. Why don't you get it?"

_Blood, then ash?_ Dean swallowed -- carefully. "What are you talking about?"

Chas turned back around. "I didn't mean to. I didn't want to. I couldn't stop it. They'd come, and I'd hurt them. They put me here, and I hurt people here. I didn't want to. I could see it, but it wasn't me. Then the light came, and Chris screamed, and I was better."

_Crap._ Dean thought he might understand. Chas wasn't possessed, they'd tested him enough times. He wasn't possessed _now_, but he had been. Whatever had happened in Jacksonville had pulled the demon out.

"Dude, you don't understand."

"No, _you_ don't understand!" Chas pressed harder, and Dean felt the fabric of his shirt split. Felt a faint trickle of blood spring up. Saw Sam tense and straighten, his mouth starting to fall open, as though to speak.

Or scream.

Dean caught his eyes and tried to will him to stay quiet. Sam's mouth closed. Chas didn't seem to notice any of it. "No one did. I tried to tell them it wasn't me, but they didn't -- and others came. And they wanted to leave, just like you. They didn't understand what's out there. This is the only place it's safe. I had to. I didn't mean it, but I had to stop them from leaving."

Sam's eyes widened. "You killed them."

"I had to stop them from leaving."

"Dude." Dean forced his voice not to shake. "Told you he was nuts."

"Dean, please shut up." Sam inhaled, exhaled, and took a slow step forward, his hands out. "There's nothing out there, Chas. We've been there. We know."

Chas turned his head again, and Dean slowly raised one arm. "You stop them."

"Yeah, Chas. That's what we do."

"You want to stop me, too."

"I'd like it if you didn't kill my brother," Sam said, his voice hard-edged, like he was holding something back. "But we can help you."

_Not likely,_ Dean thought. He inched his hand further upwards. If Chas kept his eyes on Sam a little bit longer, he could --

Suddenly, the knife wasn't against Dean's collarbone any more. It wasn't in Chas' hand.

Sam's eyes had gone wide, his mouth open. His hands curled over his stomach. He took a breath, then looked down. The knife was in his gut, just over his left hip.

* * *

Dean didn't remember moving. One moment he was up against the wall, Chas between him and his brother. The next, Chas was on the ground, and Dean was standing next to Sam.

Sam, whose knees were buckling like they hadn't since Florida. Sam, who was _bleeding_.

"Sam, Jesus."

"I didn't know I could do that." Sam's voice was barely above a whisper, and he was staring down at his stomach, even as he folded slowly toward the floor. "I didn't think I could do that anymore."

"It's okay, it's just a scratch. You're okay, man, you hear me? If I can get blown up by a car, you can take a knife."

"You were going to leave," Chas mumbled from the floor behind Dean. Dean let out a low growl and spun.

"You son of a bitch!"

"Dean." Sam's voice shook, and he spun back, hands out and fluttering, not sure what to touch. Sam's hands were on the handle of the knife.

"No, no, Sammy, don't touch it. Don't."

Too late. Sam had the blade out in a moment and tossed it to one side, pressing his hands over the wound.

"Dammit, Sammy."

"It's okay." Sam gasped, and he pressed harder.

"Let me find a suture kit."

Sam shook his head. "It's okay, Dean. It's -- just gimme a second." He closed his eyes, his nose scrunching up and his lip curling. He seemed to shimmer slightly for a second, and when he opened his eyes, they were cleared of any pain. He blinked at Dean and slowly held out his hands.

There was no blood on his fingers. None on his shirt. Dean sat back on his haunches.

"Oh."

"I think since it wasn't, you know, fatal."

"It's, uh. Definitely a nice trick." Dean swallowed a laugh, feeling it reverberate in his chest, across his shoulders. "Scared the shit out of me, Sammy."

"Chas does that."

Shit, Chas. Dean spun.

Chas was gone.

* * *

They found him out by the Impala. Sam had insisted on getting Dean a bandaid before they tried to leave, no matter how much Dean protested that he was fine, that he wasn't the one who'd just taken a knife to the gut, so it had taken them a little while before they made it to the car.

Chas stood several feet behind the trunk, one of the lighters Dean had scavenged clutched in his hands. His hair was plastered flat against his head, and his eyelashes were clumped together in points over his blue eyes. Dean's nose wrinkled, like there was some strong scent in the air, and Sam shoved him back, putting himself firmly between his brother and Chas. "Get in the car."

"Like hell."

"No arguing."

"Then don't."

At least he didn't try to push Sam out of the way.

Chas looked at them, lifting one shoulder.

"You're leaving," he said.

"And how," said Dean.

"You're not going to stop us," Sam said, shifting to block Dean more completely, trying to herd him toward the Impala.

"I know." Chas lifted the other shoulder, staring down at the lighter. "Hell and Earth are empty," he continued, almost absently. "Do you think Heaven still has room?" His thumb caressed the wheel. Dean's hands landed on Sam's shoulders, yanking him back and away as Chas's thumb pressed down firmly.

He caught in seconds, smoke quickly filling the air. Then Dean was shoving Sam into the car, and the last he saw of Chas was a blackened figure tumbling forward, covered in flame.


	4. Chapter 4

_Chapter Four_

We love machines that we can see, feel, and fear. We are  
amazed by artifacts, but unimpressed by "high technology."  
For the most part, we look at the modern world about us,  
bored to tears, and say, "no, thank you. I'd rather have  
trees, birds, and monstrous mechanical contraptions. . . ."

-- Margaret P. Ratt, SteamPunk Magazine issue 1

* * *

_You want to stop her, then, ask what Chas used as an accelerant if oil was in such small supply. You want to ask about Hell and Earth and the steam engine and most importantly, what all of this is supposed to mean. But she's still talking, and you can't bring yourself to interrupt, so you flex your aching hand, turn another page in your journal -- it's new, you just got it a few days ago, but already you can tell that this story is going to fill it -- and keep writing._

* * *

It wasn't their fastest get away ever. The steam engine took a good 30 seconds to warm up enough to get the car moving.

It wasn't the longest 30 seconds of Dean's life, but it was the longest in recent memory.

He found a back road, going roughly north and west, rather than taking the highway. Highways went through cities, and cities were more likely to have people.

Dean was pretty sure he didn't want to meet any more people. Everyone they'd met since Jacksonville had gone up in flames. He'd just have to settle for ghosts for company.

They headed toward South Dakota, keeping to the back roads, Dean on constant look out to avoid anything that looked inhabited. He could live a good, long, unfortunately celibate time before he had to smell burning flesh or walk through still-cooling ash again. He knew he'd never forgive himself if the flesh and ash belonged to Bobby.

But they headed for South Dakota, because there wasn't anything else they could think of to do. They headed for South Dakota because it was Bobby, and maybe, just maybe, he'd have answers enough to keep from burning.

They headed to South Dakota because it was what, somehow, that's what they were supposed to do.

* * *

Sam didn't argue with Dean's decision to avoid cities. Dean had gone silent -- silent for Dean at least, which Sam defined as Dean not talking about anything important, just blathering on about engines or girls or ghosts to hear himself talk -- since leaving the hospital, and Sam respected it.

He had his own things to think about.

They passed people, once or twice, walking by the side of the road or peering out of buildings. The people would wave, or shout, or threaten, and Sam and Dean would ignore them and just keep on driving. More often, though, the view out the window was taken up with empty cars, abandoned tractors, and more single shoes by the side of the road than Sam could ever remember passing in one sitting. The worst was the stroller he spotted near the border, discolored by the elements, the basket hanging on the back still filled with toys and snacks and bottles full of greenish, spoiled milk. In the seat, he thought he saw a faint dusting of white, and for the first time since Jacksonville, he wanted to scream for someone other than Dean.

They had to stop frequently to fill up, both on fuel, which amounted to whatever Dean could pick up that would burn, and water for the steam. Dean hadn't worked out any sort of meter, but he didn't seem to need it. Twice, the Impala started to sputter before Dean pulled her over, and after that, he just seemed to know.

Sam remembered Dean's half-delirious comment about having become one with the car. It was getting harder and harder to dismiss that as complete nonsense.

He thought of the theater, the wreck of April's car, Chas holding the lighter, and that stroller. At least Dean bonding this way with the car wasn't likely to get anyone killed.

* * *

In Kentucky, Sam talked Dean into stopping in a library for the night.

"You that bored, not sleeping, Sammy?" Dean grinned, the sunset flashing off the green glass of his goggles. "Any normal dude would just pass the time whacking off."

"You're sick, Dean."

Dean shook his head. "I'm a perfectly healthy, red-blooded American male." But he still turned off into the empty parking lot of the small, public library Sam had noticed.

Books made about as good a pillow as anything they'd used since leaving the hospital, and Dean fell asleep quickly, stretched out on the floor between shelves in the children's section, watched over by a large, paper mache dragon that puffed cotton ball clouds of smoke -- or steam -- into the still, dusty air. Sam flipped through a copy of _Prince Caspian_ for a few minutes until Dean's breathing evened out and he was sure his brother was asleep, then slipped off into the reference section.

He looked up spontaneous human combustion first, but didn't find anything particularly useful. It almost described what they thought had happened -- the way the people had been burned completely without the fire touching anything around them -- but none of the proposed explanations felt right to Sam. He tucked the book away into his bag anyway, just in case.

He looked up steam engines and found a great deal more information. Diagrams on the inner workings, history dating back to Ancient Greece, and even a fair amount of information on systems similar to the one that Dean had created. The hours before sunrise passed more quickly than they had since Sam stopped sleeping.

They set out early, Sam collecting several more books from the shelves to bring with them while Dean brewed himself a cup of incredibly strong coffee using a small fire in the parking lot and a French press he'd found in the back offices, which he packed away to take with them along with several books of his own.

"Don't tell me you learned how to read for pleasure," Sam said, noting the pile of thick, heavy looking tomes lining the front edge of the Impala's "frunk".

Dean shrugged. "Paper burns as well as anything, Sam."

Sam froze in the act of tossing his own bag in and slowly drew it up to his chest instead, hugging the books he'd gathered protectively. Dean laughed.

"Relax, college boy. I saw _The Day After Tomorrow_, I know the rules." He picked one of the books up and showed it to Sam. It was a blue hardcover with the words _Accounting for Beginners_ printed on the dust jacket. "We only burn the boring books."

Sam relaxed by degrees. "You did that on purpose, you freakin' jerk."

Dean grabbed the bag from Sam's hands and thrust it into the frunk. "Shoulda seen the look on your face, bitch."

They were back on the road before the sun had lifted completely off the horizon.

* * *

"Did you know that automakers have been working on steam cars as recently as the mid-nineties? Completely oil- and emissions-free. Only reason they weren't on the market was a lack of infrastructure to support them."

Dean groaned as they passed a small white sign simply reading "Illinois". They were running parallel to I-24; the state governments didn't go all out on border markers on back roads, the way they did on the major freeways. "Are you seriously gonna turn this whole drive into a freakin' lecture?"

"I just think it's interesting, that's all."

"Well, it isn't."

They drove on in silence for several miles, through two stops for refueling, before Sam spoke up again.

"Did you know the land speed record for a steam car was established in 1906? 127 miles per hour, in a precursor to the Daytona 500."

Dean licked, then pursed his lips.

"Okay, that one is a little bit interesting."

* * *

From then on, Dean seemed to be determined to beat that record.

They made it out of Illinois and were driving west across Missouri in no time at all.

* * *

They stopped for the night again about midway through Missouri, and as they set out the next morning, Sam set aside his books.

"Which way are we going?"

"West. Figure we'll aim north just before Kansas City, follow the Nebraska-Iowa border into South Dakota."

"No," Sam said firmly. "Keep going west."

"We keep going west and we'll hit Kansas, Sam."

"I know." Sam leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and peering out at the horizon.

"Okay. You wanna explain what's going on in that freakish head of yours?"

"We're going to Lawrence."

Dean slammed on the brakes, leaving a streak of rubber across the deserted road, and swerved the Impala onto the shoulder, then turned sideways in the driver's seat, pushing his goggles up to give Sam the full force of his glare. "Why the hell would we want to do that?!"

Sam turned to look at Dean, and Dean suddenly had the feeling he knew exactly why Sam got so pissy every time Dean kept his goggles on while they were talking. Sam's expression was disturbingly flat, absolutely blank.

"Because that's where we'll find them."

Dean took a breath, refusing to break eye contact first, despite the way Sam's stare set the hair on the back of his neck on edge and started a dull throb between his eyes. "Find who?"

Sam broke the stare, then, turning to look out at the horizon again. It didn't make Dean feel any better.

"The others." He settled back against the seat again, and the odd, abstract moment melted away so quickly that Dean wondered if he'd imagined the whole thing. "Dude, I just think we should go there. Where it all started, you know?"

Dean ran a hand down over his face, two-day stubble scraping across his callused palm. "This some psychic thing?"

Sam shrugged. "My whole life is 'some psychic thing' now, Dean."

Dean let out a breath, then nodded. "Yeah. Okay. Lawrence." He turned back to the road and coaxed the Impala back onto it.

He hated this. But, really, there wasn't much in their lives these days that he didn't hate, at least a little.

* * *

The roads into and around Kansas City were packed with the remains of an evening rush hour, and pretty much impassable. Dean tried to tell Sam that this was a sign to skip Lawrence and just go to South Dakota, but Sam would have nothing of it.

"You put cat treads on this thing for a reason, Dean."

Dean shook his head. "No. I haven't gotten them to work, yet."

"So, go around, then."

Dean scowled, pulling the goggles down over his eyes and adjusting his leather jacket. Then he shifted the Impala into reverse, driving backwards down the road until he found a clear enough turn off.

"I hate you."

"I love you, too."

* * *

Getting around the city took most of the day, with Dean having to double back frequently and occasionally take the Impala off road to get them through. Sam could read the frustration in the hard set of Dean's lips and the way the lines of his face deepened with every new detour. He knew Dean thought they should be heading north, not west, and Sam wished he had a better explanation for asking to go to Lawrence then just "it feels right", but he didn't have words for how the world seemed to tug him that way. He could feel himself something coil up in him by degrees the closer they got. He was convinced that Lawrence would hold the answers to all the questions he'd been piling up for months.

Once past Kansas City, the trip to Lawrence was only a short hop, even avoiding highways and taking the back-most, least-used roads they could find. By sunset, they were crossing into the city of their birth.

Sam started to fidget as they got closer, a feeling of renewed energy bubbling up in him, leaving him fairly buzzing where he'd been almost entirely numb for months. It was like a form of mental pins and needles, and he dug his fingers into the creases of his jeans. He felt more than saw Dean's jaw tighten, and tried to relax.

"You'd better be right about this, Sam," Dean said.

"I am," Sam answered softly, leaning forward in his seat again, eyes never leaving the road in front of them, even as he kept Dean in the corner of his vision. "I am."

Dean's fingers tightened so sharply his knuckles audibly cracked, but he kept driving.

* * *

Missouri was standing on the sidewalk by the entrance to their old neighborhood, her hands folded across her stomach, her mouth pursed in a concerned frown. Dean couldn't help but stare as he slowed to a stop next to her, his eyebrows climbing up above the edge of his goggles towards his hairline. Sam rolled down his window and actually grinned.

"Sam and Dean Winchester," she said, not moving from her spot on the sidewalk. "It's about time you boys got here. We've been waiting a long time."

Dean opened his mouth to answer, but as usual, she cut him off.

"And take those goggles off, boy. You look like a damned fool."

Dean's mouth snapped shut, and his hand drifted up to the edge of the goggles, but he didn't shift them.

Sam leaned his elbows on the windowsill, his body hunched over so he could rest his chin on his forearms. Dean couldn't see it, but he was sure Sam was still grinning. "Missouri. You were the one who --"

She nodded before he could finish. "Been tryin' to broadcast to you two since the end of April." Dean wasn't certain if she meant the month or the woman. "Never expected it would take you this long to get into range, but I guess I ought to have known you wouldn't get here until today."

Dean frowned. "Why?"

"Well, it's November second, isn't it?"

Sam straightened so abruptly that Dean was sure he was about to hit his head on the ceiling. He turned to look at Dean, his eyes wide. Dean looked back and shrugged.

"We kinda lost track of time," he said to Missouri, his voice defensive in a way only she seemed to be able to make it.

"Guess I mighta figured that, too." She unfolded her hands and placed them on her hips. "Well? Aren't you gonna give me a ride?"

Dean looked to Sam, who looked back, his expression as confused as Dean felt, and reached back to unlock the back door. "Hop in."

"Thank you, Sam. You are a gentleman to the last." She settled into the back seat, daintily pushing Sam's books to one side. Dean took his foot off the brake and rolled his eyes. "Don't you roll your eyes at me, boy. Just because you look like an insect doesn't mean I can't tell when you're being disrespectful."

Dean opened his mouth, snapped it shut again with a scowl, and pulled away from the curb. "Where are we going?"

"Your old house, of course. Jenny and her kids will be delighted to see you."

"Jenny." Sam twisted in his seat to face Missouri while Dean drove. "You mean they --"

"You'll see soon enough, Sam. Don't you worry, though. Most of the news we have for you is good."

* * *

The old house was brightly lit in the twilight, standing out amongst the darkened houses like a beacon. Dean pulled up in front of it, parking behind a familiar-looking old tow truck. Sam climbed out almost before the Impala had stopped completely, moving forward to run his hand across the tailgate. "This is. . . ."

Missouri climbed out more slowly, giving Dean plenty of time to circle the Impala and offer her a hand. Sam figured his brother was trying to get on the woman's good side.

"It is," she said, patting Dean's arm and offering him a smile. "Bobby made his way down here in June."

Bobby was alive. Sam relaxed by degrees, almost trembling as long-held tension fled his shoulders. Dean was shaking his head, but looked as happy as Sam felt, maybe happier. He turned to face the house.

"The lights?"

"Generator. We don't use it often, so don't get used to it. We're down to our last few barrels of gasoline."

Dean nodded. "We gave up on gas awhile back. Got my baby running on steam, now."

"Is that why you're running around, looking like a mad scientist?" Missouri asked. Dean scowled again, but didn't try to talk back.

"Anyway, we thought you boys could use a good welcome home party, so Bobby got the whole thing working about an hour ago. We'll keep it running until about ten tonight. That should be plenty of time for you boys to get settled."

"We." Sam finally took his hand off Bobby's car, but couldn't bring himself to walk up to the house just yet. "Who, exactly, is here?"

"Now, now, Sam. I wouldn't want to spoil the surprise."

* * *

"We", it turned out, included not just Bobby, Jenny, Sari, and Ritchie, but also Lisa and Ben Braeden, Becky and Zach Warren, and even Deacon. Dean froze when they got into the house and saw the crowd waiting for them in the living room, then took a step back, almost backing right out the door. The lights were so bright and the crowd of people so large in comparison to anything else they'd encountered in the last several months that he felt them like a blow to the chest.

Sam was grinning broadly and moved forward to immediately pull Becky into his arms in a tight hug while Missouri looked on, a pleased expression on her face. Neither of them seemed to notice Dean's hesitation, Sam too wrapped up in his homecoming, Missouri probably too wrapped up in the positive emotions that must have been radiating out of his brother. The only thing that kept Dean from backing out completely was a sudden, firm presence behind him.

"Bit much, isn't it," the presence said softly, and Dean spun.

"Ellen."

"Dean," she said, and pulled him forward into a tight hug, much the way he'd done to her before Wyoming, what seemed like an entire lifetime ago. "You boys made it."

"You --" Dean choked, swallowed, and tried again, making no move to pull back from the embrace. "How --"

"It's alright, Dean." One of her hands moved slowly up and down along his back and he realized he was shaking. "I wish I knew. But I'm glad you boys are okay."

He did pull back, then, shifting his hands to her upper arms, just beneath her shoulders. "This doesn't make any sense. Every where we've gone, everyone we've met. And all of you survived?" He shook his head, then looked behind her. "Wait, Jo --"

"-- Is fine, too. Bobby picked us up on his way here."

Dean swallowed again, then pulled her back into the hug, pressing his head into her shoulder. "Thank God."

She rubbed his back again, then eased back. "Come on, the rest of 'em are gonna want to greet you, too." She kept a hand on his arm, steering him back in towards the living room. Lisa stepped up immediately, Ben at her side, and Dean was soon swept up into more hugs, kisses on the cheek, and cheerful greetings then he'd had possibly in his entire life.

Missouri looked on all the while, and when he caught her eye, nodded.

"Welcome home, Dean Winchester."

And it felt like home.

But somehow, that only scared him more.

* * *

Sam noticed Dean's hesitation at entering. He noticed everything Dean did, these days, but he didn't call him on it or draw attention to it. Dean had been twitchy about people ever since April had died, and Sam knew that, where he saw nothing but empty buildings and abandoned roads, Dean saw negative space haunted by the untimely dead. He didn't know what Dean thought he saw when he spotted their friends all waiting for them, but he could guess that it had something to do with fire, which had followed them both for more than twenty years but seemed to dog their steps even more since Jacksonville.

He wondered if Dean saw him screaming. That was what Chas had said, wasn't it? That Sam was "the Screamer"? He'd screamed in Jacksonville, had screamed in the theater before the ghosts vanished, had nearly screamed in Tennessee, at April and at Chas, when Dean had been threatened. And he felt like screaming now -- for joy, not in fear and denial.

Something niggled at him, dancing just out of sight in the back of his mind, waiting to ambush him with something he didn't think he could handle knowing. But things were finally looking up -- his friends were here and _alive_ -- and so he pushed back the dancing thing in his head and pulled Becky into his arms and clapped Zack on the back and even shared a grin with Deacon and let Dean handle himself on his own for a few minutes.

Nothing good in their lives ever lasted, and he knew, somehow, that this, this feeling of everything was finally going to be alright, would go up in flames as suddenly and as painfully as their mother and Jessica had.

He was determined to enjoy it while it lasted.

* * *

It took several hours and the generator shutting off for the homecoming to settle down into something not resembling a happy chaos. Jenny was the first to leave, taking Ritchie and Sari upstairs to bed, and Lisa, who had taken over the house next door, made her excuses not long afterwards, though Ben was reluctant to leave, eager to regale Dean with the story of his adventures since he'd last seen him. Becky had practically glued herself to Sam's side since he'd come in, and Zach kept close to both of them, talking about Stanford and graduation and getting jobs and _normal life_, but eventually, they, too, were persuaded to "leave the hunters be" as Missouri put it, and followed her and Deacon out the door. Ellen and Bobby had taken over the house across the street, but led Sam and Dean into Jenny's kitchen for the evening to fill them in on everything that had been happening.

The place had been turned into something more closely resembling Bobby's own place up in South Dakota, the table covered in occult books, a large CB radio sitting on the counter where the microwave had once sat, dingy old oil lanterns and flashlights arranged for light. Dean dropped heavily into a chair across from Ellen, running his fingers through his hair once before folding his arms on the table.

"I don't get it. More than half the world was killed last spring, but all of us still made it through. Why us?"

Bobby shrugged, leaning back against the counter. "We were hopin' you two would be able to explain that."

Sam looked away. Dean gave him a long, measuring look, noting that Ellen and Bobby were doing the same. He shook his head for seemingly the hundredth time that evening. "We're still not sure exactly what happened." He didn't say that he had a theory, and Sam didn't offer up whatever he thought of everything, either.

It wasn't an easy thing to admit. No one ever wanted to say that they were pretty sure their little brother caused the fiery death of millions of people, even if it was an accident.

Or the only way to keep the older brother from spending an eternity in hell.

Bobby gave them both that look that said he knew they weren't saying everything, but would wait until they were ready to talk. Ellen's expression wasn't much different.

"Is it --" Sam spoke up, staring down at the table. "Did this happen everywhere? Or just the States?"

Ellen shrugged. "Haven't seen any air traffic or anything, but we don't know, for sure. Jo and Robin headed out last week to find out."

"Robin?"

Bobby cleared his throat. "You knew her as Ruby."

Dean tensed. "The demon?"

"Not any more." Bobby tucked his hands into his pockets. "Not since, well, you know."

Sam pushed back from the table to pace. "But she was there, with us, in Jacksonville. Ruby was there. We didn't see her, after --"

Bobby nodded. "Says she woke up in some motel room in Florida, two guys passed out surrounded by a crapload of ash. She skedaddled."

Sam stopped, turned to face them. "She doesn't remember?"

Ellen got up, went to go pull a bottle of whiskey from a high cabinet, grabbed a few glasses. "Not really, to hear her tell it. There something you boys need to let us in on?"

Dean turned to look at Sam. Sam looked everywhere but at Dean. He sighed, then took the first glass of whiskey Ellen poured with a nod of thanks, tossing most of it back in one go.

"We ran into some trouble. Ruby, and a couple others. The new one, the kid. Lilith."

Bobby hissed softly. "You faced Lilith?"

Dean nodded. "Her eyes went white. Deal wasn't even up yet, but I could feel her. Pullin' the soul right out of me." He hadn't breathed a word about this since it happened. Hadn't even let himself think about it, the way he'd felt himself dying under Lilith's gaze. It'd been like meeting the reaper outside Roy Le Grange's tent, only ten times worse. So much more _unnatural_. He tossed back the rest of his whiskey, set the glass on the table, and nodded when Ellen moved to refill it. Her own glass was nearly empty, already.

He could hear Sam step up behind him. "Dean."

He wouldn't turn around. "It, uh. Ruby tried to stop her, I guess. I still don't really know what she was there for. But Lilith just threw her back, didn't even look. She had Sam pinned, too, and was just pulling. Then everything went white."

Ellen was watching him, her mouth set, but her eyes as soft as he'd seen them. Bobby was staring at Sam. Dean hunched his shoulders. "That's it. After that, it was just Sam and me. Trying to figure out what happened."

Bobby kept his eyes on Sam. "That ain't it and you both know it."

Dean looked up. "Bobby, we --"

"Shut it, Dean." He stayed against the counter, still studying Sam, his voice holding an odd note. "We saw you, Sam. All of us. Near as I can tell, everybody that survived did."

Dean hunched further into his seat, bracing himself. He felt Sam go still behind him.

"Saw me what?"

"Just your face," this from Ellen, sounding curious. "Shouting Dean's name. Can't say we've made much sense of it."

"He doesn't remember," Dean started, only to be cut off by a sharp look from Ellen.

"Let him tell it. Sam?"

"I -- I don't. Just, she was hurting Dean, and then. Everything changed. _Everything._" Sam's voice hit a deeper note on the last word, and Bobby and Ellen took a simultaneous breaths, leaning back. Sam must have shown them something of what he was, now. Then Sam spoke again, and he was back to normal. "What are you saying?"

Bobby and Ellen exchanged a glance, and Dean shut his eyes. Coming here was a mistake. They should have gone somewhere else. Anywhere else.

"Dean?" Sam's voice was so young, then, so much like the little brother who followed him around when they were small, that Dean winced. He swallowed, hand tightening on his glass. "Dean."

"There are no demons," he said finally, so quietly he wasn't sure anyone but Sam would hear him. "Chas said it. Hell and Earth are empty. Everyone here, it's all people we know. People you know."

"You're saying I did this."

"I'm saying I don't know."

"I did this," Sam said again, his voice a bit further away. Dean thought he must be pacing again. "I destroyed the world."

"You saved my life."

"I ended everything."

"We don't know that!" Dean slammed the glass into the table, felt it break under his hand. He pushed back, stood up, and spun to face his brother. "All we know is it changed! That's it! It changed and I'm here, and we're alive. _That_ is what matters!"

Sam's expression was all too familiar. Guilt and fear and pain, open and agonizing in his eyes, in the shape of his mouth. He held Dean's gaze, begging him with his eyes to tell him he was wrong.

Dean knew that even if he tried, Sam wouldn't believe him.

"The ghosts in the theater?" he asked. "The kids?"

Dean looked away.

Sam let out a breath. "I -- I need to --"

And he was gone. Out of the room, out of the house, though Dean hadn't seen him leave. Just gone.

Dean heard the rattle of glass behind him, the slosh of liquid, then Bobby was standing next to him, handing him another glass of whiskey. "Sit back down and let us get a look at your hand." Dean looked down, noticed he was bleeding. "And talk, boy. Sounds to me like you've got a lot more to tell us."


	5. Chapter 5

_Chapter Five_

Oh, dear reader, if you are not shocked by these proceedings, and by the  
dreadful hints of things to come, then you are made of sterner stuff than I,  
for I am not too proud to say that my blood ran cold at the very thought.

-- _G.D. Falksen's An Unfortunate Engagement: A literary serial  
in several parts_ part 2, SteamPunk Magazine issue 2

* * *

_You've run out of pages and she's run out of whiskey. But she still talks so you still listen, closing the journal and opening it again as though her words spring directly from its pages. If you don't remember drawing some of the sketches that fill the pages under your fingertips, you don't think anything of it. Not when the evening is filled already with whiskey and words that have wrapped around your mind like smoke or drugged steam._

* * *

They'd been up most of the night. Bobby and Ellen had asked enough questions that Dean couldn't leave anything out, even if he'd wanted to.

And he hadn't. For all the secrets he'd kept, his entire life, it had seemed like once he got going explaining everything that had happened between then and now, he couldn't stop.

So much had changed. The entire world was different, and there was no going back. He hadn't let himself grieve in six months, just kept moving forward, working on the Impala and trying to watch out for Sam, just as he had always done.

And now it was over. They were home, as home as they'd ever been or ever would be, and there was no where else to go. And Sam was gone. And it had all come pouring out.

Finally, they'd called it a night, Dean falling asleep on the sofa in the living room while Ellen and Bobby headed across the street to the house they'd claimed, all of them lost in their own thoughts.

Sam didn't come back. Dean woke up, blinking at a picture of a family he barely knew, and Sam wasn't there.

Getting off that sofa to face the morning was the hardest thing he'd ever done.

* * *

When Sam left the house, he wanted to make things burn.

That was what this was all about, after all, wasn't it? Sam and burning. Sam burning, things, not himself, because Dean would never let him do that. Sam had burned the world, apparently, because Dean hadn't let him burn himself -- hadn't let him stay dead, back in Cold Oak, hadn't done as he'd promised and taken Sam out when Sam had become a danger to everything and everyone. And now, Sam understood. The demon had given this to him, this legacy of fire that wiped out demon and human alike, and if this wasn't exactly what the demon had wanted Sam to do with that power, it didn't matter. Because Dean had failed and hadn't saved Sam, not from himself.

So Sam went to make things burn.

He left town first, though, unwilling to put the few people he'd apparently managed to spare into danger. He headed west, running as quickly as he could, far faster than he ever should have been able to, never stumbling or stalling even as he ran through tall weeds and over broken pavement. He didn't follow any roads or paths or any man- or animal-made route if he could help it, didn't stop until he'd reached the center of a field big enough that he couldn't see anything but dried, broken crops and rusted center pivot sprinklers. He dropped to his knees, feeling the plants bend and snap beneath his weight, opened his mouth, and screamed.

It wasn't Dean's name, this time, or any recognizable word. It was just a wide expulsion of sound, ripping up and out his throat, and wavering up and down in pitch. It went on longer than the largest breath he should have been able to take would have allowed, and it seemed to set the air crackling around him.

And nothing happened. The browned plants didn't catch and burn, did nothing more than sway in the breeze, and finally, Sam stopped, wrapped his hands around his biceps, and started walking.

He reached a road, eventually, and spotted two piles of ash, just beginning to stir and scatter in the wind. He sat down, then, hard on the edge of the field, and discovered that he could still cry.

* * *

Bobby, of course, wanted to get a look at that steam engine.

"Damn." It came out on a low whistle as Bobby reached up to pull off his hat and run his hand through his thinning hair. "You do all this on the fly?"

Dean shrugged, suddenly self-conscious, remembering the way April had reacted to the thing. "We stopped. I told you. The theater, the gas station, the hospital."

"But no garage."

"No garage."

Bobby circled the Impala, bending low to get a good look at the entire system. "Why the rear engine?"

"Figured it'd be a good idea to let the steam out behind the driver. 'Course, I could've just run pipes to the rear, but I didn't want to have to deal with all that heat blasting back at me on the road."

"Makes sense. What're you using as fuel?"

"Whatever we can find. Paper, mostly, or sticks and leaves."

Bobby turned to stare at him. "You got that auto-fed?"

"Uh." Dean folded his arms, sticking his hands into his armpits. It was colder than it had been down south, and he'd gotten used to being surrounded by heat. "Not really. Doesn't seem to be much of an issue, though."

"Woulda thought oil would be a better choice. Can regulate it better, more efficiency."

"Oil's not exactly all over the place right now, Bobby."

Bobby nodded. "True enough."

"She's, uh. Still a work in progress, though. Been trying to figure out how to get cat treads on her, without losing too much speed."

"Caterpillar -- now you're just talkin' nonsense, boy."

"Coulda used 'em back in Kansas City. Bumper to bumper abandoned wrecks out there. Took us forever to find a clear enough back road."

"Still, gotta know your limits."

Dean wasn't sure he actually had limits, any more. He knew Sam didn't. He bit his lower lip, lifted one shoulder and twisted his head, looking off down the street. He heard Bobby let out a breath.

"He'll be back."

"When?"

"Damned if I know. But you Winchesters are always comin' back, usually when I least expect it. Sam'll be back."

* * *

Sam kept silent, after the field. He didn't trust himself to speak without Dean around to remind him not to do -- whatever it was he had done. He promised himself he would never do -- that -- again, and he suddenly found himself understanding why Dean had been so careful, after the hospital, to avoid people.

Why Dean had looked so terrified at the sight of the group waiting for them in Lawrence.

He couldn't go back there, now, not while his emotions were still swirling around and he could feel the scream living in his throat, waiting for him to lose control again.

He remembered what Ava and Jake had said, about the switch flipping. He was pretty sure he hadn't flipped a switch. He'd blown out an entire city block of switches and was still riding the power surge. He thought about lying down to sleep, which he hadn't even tried to do for months, for fear that he'd simply fade away and never come back. He thought that maybe, just now, he didn't want to come back. Then he thought of Dean and deals and desperation and knew that wasn't an option.

Who knew what Dean would do if Sam just never returned.

So Sam walked and thought and tried to calm himself down, no sense of direction or time guiding him other than the sun.

Eventually, he turned himself towards a brightening horizon and started following the faint tug on his mind that he knew would lead him back to Lawrence.

* * *

Bobby was right, of course, but Sam took his sweet time about it. It was another two days before he showed back up, appearing out of nowhere in the door to Jenny's dining room, where they'd all gathered for an evening dinner. Dean was the only one who noticed his arrival.

He excused himself immediately, offering the group a weary smile before hurrying over. They all turned to look, of course, but Dean pushed Sam ahead of him into the living room and out the front door, avoiding their stares. As soon as they were outside, he wrapped one hand over Sam's jaw, turning his head and looking him over.

"You okay?"

"No." Sam kept his voice low, his head tilted down, his eyes away from Dean's. "Not really."

"Sam, we don't know what happened back there."

"We've got a hell of a lot of hints, Dean."

"Fine, then you didn't know. You didn't do it on purpose."

"And that's supposed to make it all better?" Sam snorted. "I accidentally ended the world. Oh, yeah, I feel great, now."

"Stop it." Dean reached up to shove Sam backwards, but stopped himself and patted him on the shoulders instead at the last moment. He could feel his worry turning to anger and getting stopped up in his throat, like the steam in the Impala had before he'd figured out how to properly regulate the pressure. He was choking on it, but he had to think that was better than attacking Sam.

Especially when he already looked like shit warmed over.

"Where were you?"

"Around. Jo and Ruby -- Robin, I guess -- are on their way back. They should get in some time tomorrow."

"You talk to them?"

Sam shook his head.

"But they -- Jo looked okay, right?"

One corner of Sam's mouth lifted. "They look good. Fit. I think this lifestyle really agrees with Jo."

Dean let some of the pressure out with a sharp laugh. "Figures."

"Dean, I --"

"Save it, Sam. We'll figure this out. There's nothing we can do now. Not about -- but we're alive. And so are others. We just have to save what we can."

Sam turned his head, staring at the door to the house. "Can't save everyone," he said, his tone dark.

Dean shrugged. "Sometimes we can't even try."

* * *

Dean didn't seem big on letting Sam out of his sight once he got back, but even the Winchester brothers couldn't be constantly in each other's shadows, and Sam found a rare moment to himself later that night, after Dean had gone to sleep. He stepped out onto the front porch of the house -- Jenny's now, though she seemed willing to allow that it was also his and Dean's -- and settled onto the steps, staring out at the street.

It was quiet, in the way that the deep forest was quiet on a wintery night. There were none of the sounds of traffic or even insects that had played as a soundtrack to Sam's life growing up. He thought of all the times he'd wished that Dean would turn his music off or their father would stop snoring so that silence would wrap him up like a warm blanket and could have cursed his foolishness.

He wondered if Hell was this quiet. He thought that, maybe, for him, it would be.

He was wrapped up enough in his own thoughts that he didn't notice her coming until she was standing at the curb between Bobby's truck and the Impala. He blinked a few times, not quiet believing she was real, then thinking for one insane moment that she was the ghost of his mother. But the hair was all wrong -- too dark -- and the look on her face, though sympathetic, wasn't as warm and loving as his mom's would have been. Had been, the one time he'd gotten to see her.

"Lisa."

She smiled slightly. "Hey Sam."

He stood, wrapping his arms awkwardly over his chest. "What -- what are you doing here?"

She shrugged. "I was out for a walk. Can't sleep, sometimes." She rubbed her neck. "Too much going on in my head, you know?"

He knew, all too well. "Yeah." He took a step forward, then stopped and stepped back and sat down again. He'd never really talked to her, back in Indiana. She'd been all Dean's, there, and even when he and Dean had been thinking that Ben might be Dean's kid, he hadn't known what he might say to her. "Yeah, I get it."

She had to have noticed his awkwardness, though she didn't acknowledge it. She walked right up to him instead, moving to sit down beside him even as she asked "Mind if I join you?"

He shrugged. "It's a free country." She snorted, and he smiled slightly. "Even freer, these days, I guess."

"Guess so." She sat, brought one knee up towards her chest, and folded her hands over it. Sam remembered Dean telling him she was a yoga instructor, once upon a time. _Gumby Girl._ She didn't look like a hot yoga teacher, now. She looked like a mom. "We haven't really talked, have we."

Sam shook his head. "No."

"You guys have been avoiding us. Even Missouri."

Sam looked away, his shoulders lifting slightly and curling forward. "It's -- all a little -- especially for Dean --"

She put one hand on his knee, and he startled. She didn't remove it. "It's okay, Sam, I get it. It's a little weird for me, too, you know. Other than the --" she wrinkled her nose "-- changeling thing that got Ben, my life's been pretty normal."

Sam sighed. "Yeah. Right up until --" He didn't know if he could tell her that he was the one who took everything away. She probably deserved to know, but admitting it out loud to someone who wasn't "in" on the supernatural seemed like it was crossing some sort of invisible line. "I'm sorry."

"My son's alive. I lost a lot of other people, but I still have him."

"I'm still sorry."

She patted his knee, then moved to stand. "I don't really understand what it is that you and Dean do, Sam." She looked towards one of the other houses -- the one she and Ben were living in, Sam guessed. "I'm pretty sure I don't _want_ to understand it. But you saved Ben last year. And I think maybe you saved him again last spring. So I just wanted to say -- thank you." She smiled weakly. "And get some sleep."

Sam bit his lower lip hard enough to feel some false immitation of pain and nodded. He didn't trust himself to speak. Her hands moved, jerking forward once before resting lightly on her hips, like she wanted to touch him but wasn't sure if she should, and she nodded. "I'll see you around. Tell Dean he should come by, sometime. Ben's starting to think he doesn't like him."

Sam swallowed. "I will."

She turned to walk away, unhurried and casual like she had nothing to fear from the world anymore, and Sam pushed himself to his feet, heading back into the house.

He wondered what, if anything, he would really tell Dean.

* * *

As predicted, Jo and Robin arrived on horseback the next day, shortly after the sun had reached its peak. Jo rode an appaloosa, tacked out western style, looking like she'd been born in the saddle. Robin was slightly less comfortable on a blood bay, its rich, deep red a sharp contrast to its black hooves, mane, and tail. They kept to the grass whenever possible, something about avoiding unnecessary wear and tear on their horses' shoes. It wasn't as though blacksmiths were in easy supply.

Robin took one look at Dean and Sam and offered to stable the horses. She couldn't seem to get away from the two of them fast enough. Jo, on the other hand, brightened the moment she saw them.

It was hugs and tears all around, all over again, and not just over seeing Dean and Sam again. Ellen had been worried, in her usual quiet, no-nonsense way, and was clearly relieved to have her daughter back, whole and healthy.

Sam was right; the modern cowboy life really did seem to have agreed with Jo.

"Didn't make it to Mexico," she said, right from the top. "But we heard stories. Pretty sure what happened happened all over. It's bad, but not like we thought. There's a whole crew of anarchists in Oklahoma City that are havin' a ball. Down in Dallas they even got the power station running."

She'd plopped right down at the table the moment she got inside, digging into a can of beef stew without even bothering to heat it first. Every sentence was punctuated with a jab of her spoon, sending half-coagulated broth flying. She was staring at Dean and Sam the whole time, a thoughtful expression on her face.

"Anyway, we didn't make it all the way. Came across something in El Paso I think you guys should see." And she pulled a thin package from her pocket, wrapped up in the sports section of an old newspaper and taped together with electrical tape, thumping it down on the table. She patted it once with her hand, then slid it towards Dean.

He gave it a long, suspicious look before he tore into it.

It was a journal, leather bound, but not quite like his dad's. Where John's had been a binder, pages added and taken out on the fly, building up to a cohesive, if chaotic, whole, this one was properly bound, the pages folded in half and then sewn together to the leather exterior. It was battered, much more so than even John's had ever been, and the pages were deeply yellowed with age. Dean opened it gingerly, smoothing down the first page and peering at the long, faded lines of the handwritten script.

"The hell is this?"

"Just look at it. You'll see." She was still staring at them, at him, specifically. Dean knew he looked different, and not just from the scars he'd gotten when April's car had exploded. His leather jacket was half-ruined, sewn back together in places with thick, off-color thread, and the glass glittered in the light of the candles covering every surface. He had his goggles down around his neck, still wore the tool belt like it was a talisman, some sort of mark of who he'd become.

And he had _become_, he reflected. He wasn't a hunter any more. He was something else, something new. Something between.

He raised a challenging eyebrow at her, and she lifted hers in return. His mouth quirked on one side, and he started turning the pages of the journal.

It was old, that was easy enough to tell, though the entries weren't dated. There was no nameplate in the front that he could see, nothing to identify who had written the mostly illegible script, until he got almost midway through. He took a breath.

It was the Colt.

Sketched out in brown, fading ink, every detail, down to the engraving on the handle, carefully reproduced in a diagram.

"This is --"

"Samuel Colt's." Bobby breathed the name like it was a benediction. "Look at this." He pointed to the writing that lined the page facing the sketch. Dean looked closer, made out a phrase or two of Latin, then a flurry of badly spelled English.

"It's instructions. For building -- Jesus." Dean ran his fingers over the drawing, then tucked the tip of one under the page, hesitant to turn it. "Man, this woulda been awesome to have last year." He shook his head, feeling a grin grow on his face as he lifted the page. "Hell, we could --" He stopped short.

Sam leaned over his shoulder. "Dean, what --" He stopped as well, and Dean knew he was staring.

It was the Colt. The redesigned, stripped down one that Bobby had built from the original with Ruby's help. "No way. There's --"

"Keep going." Jo was smirking now, still staring at Dean. "It gets better."

Dean lifted his gaze to stare back. "You're bullshitting us. You made this, somehow."

"How could I? I never even saw the Colt, much less whatever that gun is. Keep going."

Dean swallowed, then turned the page.

There were several more filled with just the writing, which Dean figured Sam would have to take a closer look at, later. None of it made sense to him, but Sam, at least, had the patience to try and make heads or tails of the odd inscriptions. He froze again as he got to the middle of the book, the air rushing from his lungs in a sharp hiss.

"No fucking way."

There, drawn out in black and white -- well, yellow and sepia, anyway -- was Dean himself, staring out from the page and smirking.

It was unmistakably him. Even with the odd artistic flourishes and occasional smears of ink. It was a much better sketch than the one the police had done back in St. Louis. The Dean on the page had a light stubble gracing his chin, which was held at a jaunty angle. He wore the leather jacket, patched and pock-marked and sewn together, and held his gun, the modern semi-automatic Colt 1911. He wore his amulet, his tool belt, and his goggles. He even had the wedge shaped gash in the visible ear.

Dean looked back up at Jo. Jo stared at Dean.

"I didn't know what to make of it. Figured it was some kind of, hell, I don't even know what. An ancestor, or something."

"It's not." That was Sam, reaching out to touch the page, grasping the corner of it and tilting it into the light. "It's you, Dean. I can't quite make out what it says."

Dean tugged the book away from Sam's reaching hands and quickly turned the page. He didn't want to know what it said. He wanted to feed the whole damned book into the new engine of the Impala and let it power them far, far away from --

And there was the Impala, trumpet and all. Cat treads like he'd drawn on his own, much less accurate designs. He turned the page. There was Sam, his legs vanishing away into some kind vapor at the bottom of the page, his expression stricken, his mouth open as if he were screaming. He turned the page. The still he'd built for April. He turned the page. He kept turning them until he ran out of pictures, until the book was full of nothing more than the unreadable words of some long ago cowboy. Until he reached the very last page, blank save for one word:

_Finis_

He slammed the book shut, stood up, and left the room.

* * *

He tried to work on the Impala, but his hands were shaking too hard, and he was afraid he'd break something. He hefted his wrench, tossed it from his uninjured hand to his bandaged one, relishing in the throb the movement sent through his palm, then tossed it back. Then he stepped back away from the cars and threw it with all his strength, listening to it clatter against the asphalt. He reached for his tool belt and pulled out each of his tools, one by one, and threw them as well. Then threw his goggles, his jacket, and even his gun -- though he made sure the safety was on first. When he ran out of things to throw he let out a strangled growl and threw himself bodily to the ground, laying out flat on the road in a way he never would have dared before.

He hated this. Hated the fear and the worry about what had happened to the world. Hated the dead people, hated the living, hated Jo for bringing the book back. He hated Samuel Colt, hated him especially, for knowing about him and Sam. For putting it all down in that book, writing their future like it was destiny. Like it had to happen.

Dean hated destiny. Destiny meant that a demon had had it out for his brother from the day of his sixth month birthday. Destiny meant his mother had to die and his father had to hunt and die and Dean and Sam had to hunt and kill and live.

Destiny had destroyed his life.

When Sam appeared, suddenly looming over him, possibly from nowhere, Dean found himself hating his brother a little bit, too.

"You alright?"

"This is fucked up, Sam."

"Yeah." Sam lowered himself to the ground and stretched out next to him. He stared up at the sky, a clear, sharp blue, completely cloudless, then turned his face towards Dean. Dean watched him back. "You stay out here," Sam said, "you're going to burn."

"Bitch."

"Jerk."

Okay. Maybe he didn't really hate Sam.

* * *

Sam couldn't wait to get his hands on the journal again. Dean wanted to keep him from it. He came up with distraction after distraction, suddenly wanting Sam's opinion on everything: the car, the living arrangements, what to have for breakfast, what to eat for dinner. Even Jo and Robin's horses.

Sam thought he knew why Dean was doing it. Dean had never reacted well to the idea of predestination. Even at Pastor Jim's, growing up, he'd hated the gospels, the entire story of Jesus Christ as a savior and sacrificial lamb. He'd always refused to believe in Sam having a destiny. There was always a choice, to Dean. Always some other option.

It was one of the few things that had always kept the two of them going.

When Dean tried to get Sam to help him do the dishes one evening, a little more then a fortnight since they'd arrived, Sam finally called him on it.

"Stop it, Dean."

"Stop what?" He almost convinced Sam. His expression was so open, so completely innocent, that Sam was sure anyone else would have believed it. Of course, no one else knew Dean as well as Sam did.

"I'm going to look at that journal."

Dean threw down the dish towel he was holding and stalked toward the door that lead to the backyard. "Why? What's the goddamn point?"

"Answers." Sam followed him, leaning against the door frame next to Dean, facing his brother as Dean faced the yard. "Don't you want to know why? Why all this happened? If I really -- don't you need to know?"

"No." The single syllable was curt and cold. "I don't."

"Bull." Sam crossed his arms. "What if it tells us a way out? What if Samuel Colt had some idea how to fix all this?"

"Fix it?" Dean turned his head abruptly to stare at Sam. The silver streak that marked his hair shone faintly in the moonlight. "You think this can be fixed?"

"I think if there's even a slightest chance, we have to check it out. We owe it to --"

"We don't owe anyone anything!"

"Yes, we do." Sam reached out and grabbed hold of Dean's upper arms, his hands engulfing his brother's biceps, rumpling his patched and quilted flannel shirt. "All those people, Dean. What if they didn't have to be dead?"

"They are, Sam. How the hell are we supposed to fix that? You can't reverse death."

"You did."

And Dean deflated, just slightly, his shoulders sagging as he rested a fraction of his weight against Sam's grip. "That's different."

"How?"

"Well, for one thing, I don't think a demon's gonna take my soul in return for millions of people. Even if there were any demons left."

Sam let him go abruptly and turned his head, swallowing. "That's not funny."

"It wasn't supposed to be."

Sam shook his head, taking a few steps back from the door and turning to pace across the room towards the sink. "Something's not right about all this, Dean. This doesn't feel right."

"Yeah, because post-apocalyptic worlds are supposed to feel great."

"You know what I mean!" Sam said it without thinking, just a burst of frustration, but he saw in Dean's expression that his brother did know what he meant. It had been there all along, hidden beneath the constant activity and insistence on moving forward. It was in every part of the Impala's new engine, from the trumpet venting the steam to the IV lines feeding into the boiler. Dean had known, all along, that something wasn't right. He'd been testing the limits, challenging himself beyond what he knew he could do. Trying to break it down.

But it hadn't worked. The Impala ran, on steam, books, and a prayer. It ran when everything dictated that it couldn't possibly do so.

"Yeah," Dean said finally. "Fine. I do. But I have no freakin' clue what we can do about it."

"Then let me read the journal."

"Or," said a new and painfully familiar voice from out on the back lawn. Dean and Sam spun to face it. "You could let me explain a bit of it."

Dean's jaw was tight, the muscles along the side of his face jumping, twitching the edges of the raised pink lines that criscrossed his cheekbone. He didn't say anything, so Sam said it for him.

"Bela."

* * *

"I can't believe you left that bitch alive."

"Shut up and let her talk, Dean."

* * *

Bela wouldn't come into the house, instead standing in the middle of Jenny's yard, her hands tucked deep into the pockets of her trench coat. She wore riding leathers and boots, English style, and even had a black crop tucked under one elbow. She wasn't wearing a helmet, but the way her hair fell, Sam could tell she had been, recently, and for quite some time. She looked dingy and tired, for all her constant air of dignity. Where Jo wore the western riding style like a well-worn and pleasantly familiar glove, on Bela it seemed more of a series of restrictive straps she'd grown resigned to not getting out of.

That was it: resignation. It was the air that seemed to hover over her, hiding behind her customary smirk. Like she found everything she was doing and had done distasteful but necessary.

"Right," Dean said, refusing to step down from the porch that ran the width of the house. The grass stretched between him and Bela like No Man's Land. Sam kept close to Dean's side, though he wasn't sure if he was waiting to have to restrain Dean, or protect him. "Talk, then."

"Aren't you going to offer me a drink? The world has grown impossibly dusty, over the last several months."

"No," Dean said. "We aren't."

"Really, Dean. You have no sense of etiquette."

"I'll etiquette your ass if you don't start talking."

"What does that even mean? You're just rearranging phrases."

"Enough." Sam cut them both off before their "banter" could get too carried away. Or trying to, at the very least.

"How do you even know anything, Bela? What'd you do, sell yourself to some demon? Oh, wait, that's right, they're all gone. Ghost, maybe. Always knew you'd be oh-so ready to become some spirit's bitch."

"Quite the opposite, I assure you. I've known what you and Sam were going to do for quite some time, before I even met you. Don't you remember our first conversation, Dean? I remember quite clearly."

Sam shot his gaze sideways to Dean, watched his brother's eyes widen fractionally, then narrow.

Nope, Dean definitely didn't remember. Bela caught on almost as quickly.

"Really, it's so very good to know that I made that much of an impression. I believe my precise words were 'we're all going to hell, might as well enjoy the ride'. And I assure you, I did enjoy it. Quite thoroughly."

Dean's face twisted into a scowl. "You freakin' bitch."

"Ah ah. No need to get nasty. As I recall you even agreed with me. Though I must admit, I haven't much enjoyed the destination. Still, that's rather the point of Hell, isn't it?"

Dean moved forward, his body tense, and Sam caught him with one arm across his chest. Killing Bela now wouldn't do them any good. They needed more information. "What the hell are you even doing here?"

"I'm afraid New York now rather resembles Venice. I have no boat and no desire to swim in the expanded Hudson, and, well. This seemed like it would be the next most interesting place to be."

"Interesting." Dean's voice fairly dripped with sarcasm. "Well, now, that's great. You knew the world was going to end and you didn't even lift a finger to stop it. Now you want us to keep you entertained?" He pressed against Sam's arm, straining to break his hold. Sam willed more strength into his forearm to keep his brother in check.

"And what do you believe I ought to have done? I prepared myself. Anyone else might have done the same."

Sam frowned. "Prepared yourself how?"

"I made sure I was forewarned, of course. And fore-armed."

"Fore --" Dean cut himself off with a swear. "The Colt!"

"A gun that can kill anything. There may be no more demons, but I assure you, there's still plenty of other nasty critters around to threaten a single girl in this world. The colt was insurance, and I seized the opportunity to procure it. And it's been quite effective, I must say."

Dean let out a low growl, pressing harder against Sam's arm, and Sam was hard-pressed not to let his brother rip Bela to pieces. "If we'd had the Colt, you bitch, none of this would've happened!"

Bela blinked, though she kept her cool. "What do you mean?"

"Sam coulda killed that Lilith bitch with that instead of going all nuclear."

Bela lifted her chin, her eyes sliding off to one side. "Ah. I hadn't much thought of that."

"I'm gonna kill you." Dean wrapped a hand around Sam's forearm, struggling to push it away. "I'm going to freakin' kill you. This is all your fault! All of this is on your head."

"Now." Bela backed up several paces, her expression opening to reveal her sudden apprehension. "Now, wait a minute, there's absolutely no need to be rash."

"Oh, I think there's every reason to be freakin' rash."

"Dean, stop it!" Sam swung around to step in front of Dean, bodily blocking his path to Bela.

"Sam, get out of my way."

"No, Dean, we can't. You can't do this."

"Listen to your brother, Dean."

"You shut up," Sam ordered, without turning his gaze from Dean's. "Stop this now, Dean. Killing Bela isn't going to change anything."

"Yeah, well, it'll make me feel better!"

"No it won't. Not for long. Don't you think enough people have died?"

"Sam." Dean's voice was low, holding a tinge of desperation. "Just let me rough her up a little?"

Sam turned his head, looking over his shoulder out of the corner of his eye. Bela was edging off to one side, clearly about to make a break for it. He pursed his lips and took a breath.

"Yeah," he said and he took a step back.

Behind him, he heard Bela let out a noise that sounded suspiciously like an "eep".

* * *

Dean tied her to a chair in Jenny's kitchen. He didn't want her anywhere near the others, but didn't trust her enough to think he could get her across the street to Bobby and Ellen's without her pulling some sort of fancy trick out of her ass. He tightened the ropes around her upper arms just a little bit more than strictly necessary, then leaned over her shoulder, putting his mouth close to her ear.

"How's that? Interesting enough for you?"

"Really, Dean. I had no idea you were into bondage."

"Save it, sister. We got no time for 'witty banter', these days."

Sam swept in a moment later, a heavy leather saddle bag slung over one shoulder. "I stabled her horse with Jo and Robin's. Robin said she'd take care of wiping it down, or whatever."

Dean nodded. "Awesome. Whatcha got there?"

"Bela's bags."

"What?" Dean grinned. "No Prada? Bela, honey, you're movin' down in the world."

Bela scowled at him, but wisely kept silent. Dean flashed her another smirk, then strode over to take the bag from Sam. "Let's see what we've got here."

"What the hell is going on in here?"

Dean was getting really sick of these kinds of interruptions. He half-turned, lifting a shoulder in Deacon's general direction. "Nothin' much, Deacon. Just a little thief we caught hanging around outside."

Deacon frowned, looking Bela over. "You sure tying her up was such a good idea?"

"Best one I've had in months." Dean plopped the saddle bag down on the counter next to the radio and flipped one side of it open. A few shirts, all in black, a half-empty bottle of spring water, of all things, a handful of -- _ew_ -- tampons. A pair of lacy red panties -- _nice_ -- which he used to carefully pull out a wide assortment of odd looking talismans and amulets. No way was he casually touching anything occult-y he found in Bela's bags. Once he had the pouch empty, he spun the bag around, then started sifting through the other side.

He could hear Sam and Deacon talking lowly behind him, probably discussing the Bela situation. It was odd, but for all the time they'd spent there, Deacon really hadn't been around that much. He was sort of the odd man out in their little group, anyway. Not a hunter, not a former demon, and not part of a larger family. Still, he and Sam had helped the man out the year before. He just hadn't thought that Sam had grown as fond of Deacon as he was of Becky and Jenny and the others.

Actually, he was pretty sure Sam had come close to hating Deacon, especially with the way he'd used Dean as a punching bag, as much as both of them understood the reasons why. Sam hadn't even wanted to get in on helping him out. The whole "jail" concept had freaked him right out, and he didn't follow Dean's "any friend of Dad's is a friend of ours" code. Still, Sam's burst of mojo had let Bela live. Dean had to figure anything was possible.

But he couldn't shake the feeling that there was something off about Deacon's presence.

The second pouch contained another pair of breeches, this one a dark, dusty green instead of the khaki colored ones she was currently wearing, and Dean almost pushed the bag away before he realized the pants were wrapped around something hard and heavy. Something that felt rather familiar. He quickly unwrapped the object, hefting its familiar weight in his hands.

Bela had brought the Colt.

Finally, things were beginning to look up.

"Hey, there." Deacon's voice came from behind him. "Put that down, son."

Dean turned. Deacon was still standing on one side of Bela, his body facing Sam, who stood on her other side. His eyes were glued to the Colt. Like he knew what it could do. Like he was afraid of it.

Deacon really didn't fit the pattern.

Sam was looking between Dean and Deacon, his brow furrowed in confusion. They lifted when he saw what was in Dean's hand. "The Colt."

"Finally got it back," Dean answered with a smile, though he kept his eyes fixed on Deacon. He tried to identify what it was that was bothering him so much. It wasn't just the pattern. Deacon almost fit, just enough to not raise too many suspicions, but Dean couldn't shake the feeling that there was something inherently wrong with this picture.

He'd been a hunter long enough to know when to trust those feelings.

With a sense of deja vu, he raised the Colt, directing it at the center of Deacon's chest. He caught sight of Sam's jaw dropping open out of the corner of his eye.

"Dean."

"What are you doing here, Deacon?"

Deacon took a slight step backwards. "I came to get some food. That a crime all of a sudden?"

Dean shook his head. "Nah. 'Course, it'd make a whole lot more sense if you'd been stayin' here."

"Jenny's got better food, what can I say?"

"Jenny's got canned soup."

"And peaches," Deacon said with a shrug. "Can't forget the peaches."

"Dean, seriously, put the gun down."

Dean's hand tightened around the butt of the Colt. "No can do, Sammy. You wanted answers, I'm about to get them." He lifted his chin to Deacon. "What are you?"

* * *

"Dean, come on." Sam took a step forward, then stopped, his hands fisting and loosening at his sides. "The demons are gone, Dean, that's just Deacon."

"Is it?" Dean's gaze didn't waver. Neither did his aim. "He doesn't fit, Sam. Why the hell would you save Deacon?"

"Why did I save anybody? I don't know, Dean."

"Bobby and Ellen are easy. Hell, they're practically like parents to us. And Jo? Can't have Ellen without Jo. Figure Robin's some kinda guilt complex. Jenny and her kids, Lisa and Ben, they got families. Ones you know, that you've met. Can't break up the families. And Rebecca and Zach, you guys go way back. Missouri's useful, all that psychic woodge she's got going for her. Hell, even Bela here meant we could get the Colt back. But why Deacon? You didn't even like Deacon."

Sam felt his mouth widen with each person Dean listed off. His brother had actually thought this through. Gone through each of the survivors and worked out their connection to Sam, to the situation. "Dean, this is insane."

"Something isn't right, here, Sam. Can't you tell?"

"Well, for one thing, you're pointing a gun at me."

Dean cut Deacon off with a twist of his lips and a tightening of his fingers. "You shut up. Unless you're plannin' on telling us who the fuck you are."

Sam looked from Dean to Deacon again. It was like the cabin, Dad, and the yellow eyed demon, all over again. Dean had been right, then. Could he be right, now?

Yeah. Sam trusted Dean. It was one of the laws of his universe, less flexible than even gravity. Sam trusted Dean, and right now, Dean knew that Deacon was off.

He nodded, stepping towards Dean, his eyes now focused on the former prison guard. "Got any theories, Dean?"

"Not yet." Dean tilted his head slightly in a shrug. "I'm workin' on it, though. You were right, bro, there's something off. With this whole fucked up world." He took a step closer and slightly to the left, starting to circle Deacon, his aim never changing. "Let's start right at the beginning, how about that? Sam destroyed mankind. From one moment to the next, millions of people just went 'poof'. How did he do that?"

Sam swallowed and tried not to wince at Dean's phrasing, but he didn't interrupt. Dean needed to talk this out. He was definitely onto something, Sam just had to be patient.

"Now, let's see, he's got all those crazy powers, right? From the demon. Only he doesn't, not any more. Hasn't since I shot that motherfucker. And he never demonstrated anything like this. None of the psychic kids did. Why would the demon grant a human the power to obliterate his kind? Doesn't make sense, does it."

Bela opened her mouth to say something, then seemed to think better of it and sank deeper into her chair, as though to make herself invisible.

"So the demon didn't give Sam those powers. Couldn't, not on that level. Had to come from somewhere else. From someone or something with the ability to change the entire world."

Sam felt his eyes go wide. "Oh shit." His eyes narrowed, and he focused in on Deacon's face. "You."

Dean, who'd been looking more and more satisfied as he continued his monologue, suddenly frowned. Deacon, on the other hand, rolled his eyes and lowered his hands, his face and body shifting fluidly from the man they knew from the jail to another. One they knew from a college campus. And too many agonizing days in a small town in Florida.

The fucking Trickster.

* * *

"We've really got to stop meeting like this," the Trickster said, the expression of fear he'd worn on Deacon's face now one of smug amusement.

"Easy enough," Sam growled. Dean was pretty sure he'd picked up that tone from him. "Just stop fucking with our lives."

"But it's so much fun."

Sam strode forward, crossing the distance from Dean to the Trickster in three long steps, then kept going, driving the shorter man -- god -- whatever -- into the wall of the kitchen. Dean scowled, then after a moment of hesitation, lowered the Colt slightly. Sam was blocking his shot.

"Why?" Sam's voice, amplified beyond what his body should have been capable of, rang through the entire house, and Dean winced.

"You're still tryin' to boost your brother there out of his deal. Just givin' you a look at what might happen if you did."

Sam's eyes went wide and his teeth ground together audibly. "Why do you even care? What does Dean's deal have to do with you?"

"Dragging a dead guy back to life? Turning over heaven and earth to try and save a damned soul?" The Trickster shook his head, making a soft "tsk" with his tongue. "Really, now. Is there anything more pompous and arrogant than that?"

Dean found himself nodding. The bastard had a point. And it was his M.O.

"How about killing a god?" Sam pulled the Trickster away from the wall and slammed him backwards again. "That egotistical enough for you?"

The Trickster made as if to think, then tilted his head. "Yep, that'd do it, too. Of course, you boys have done that, too. Three times, even."

"So what makes you think that we won't kill you?" Sam shot Dean a glance. Dean returned it with a steely one of his own, bringing the Colt back up into a steady aim. "Bet we can do it, too. That's the gun that can kill anything. Haven't you heard?"

The Trickster's eyes slid to meet Dean's, then flicked down to the gun. "That's the rumor. Of course, you kill me now, and your brother goes bye-bye. Time resets, Lilith drags his soul away before his year is even up."

Dean let out a low breath. He didn't want to die. He really didn't want to go to hell. He really, _really_ didn't want to get dragged there by a demon who looked like a grade school kid. Sam didn't move.

"I'm willing to take that chance," he said.

"Are you?" said the Trickster. "Because you could let me go now, and Dean would live. You could both ride off into the sunset like the good little redneck heroes you are. Sure, the world would still be screwed, and it'd still be your fault, but you two would be alive." He met Dean's gaze, his eyes twinkling in a way that Dean honestly hadn't thought was any more than a crappy literary cliche. "And isn't that all that matters?"

Sam didn't move. He seemed to be frozen in place. He was considering it. Dean, in exchange for the rest of mankind. Or saving the world, and damning his brother in the process.

It should have been easy. Dean was just one man, and a fucked up one, at that. Even he had to admit it. Their father would have made it in an instant, had done, a couple of times over. It was the choice he made when he begged Sam to shoot him back in the cabin. The choice he made when he warned Dean he might have to kill Sam. One Winchester wasn't worth the world.

But they weren't John Winchester. And Dean didn't want to die.

Time seemed to slow down, then, Bela's struggling against the ropes holding her to the chair almost freezing completely, as Sam considered his options. He was the one being offered the choice, and Dean knew that, whatever he decided, it would kill him.

And Dean couldn't let that happen.

This was all an illusion. A game played out by a psychotic demi-god with a vendetta. It was longer and more insidious than anything a djinn could cook up, simply because it was so real. Could be real, the instant the choice was made. They weren't really slowly bleeding to death in a warehouse, probably weren't even paused in a motel room in Jacksonville. But Dean knew from illusions, now. He knew one way of escaping them.

And he couldn't let Sam make this decision. He couldn't put that weight on his little brother's shoulders.

Dean hefted the weight of the gun in his hand, options running through his head almost too fast to really consider. But for all that, it was really a no-brainer. He'd made his decision as soon as he'd realized there was a choice to be made.

Dean pulled the trigger.

* * *

_She stops. You wait. She doesn't continue._

_There's light, gray and heavy with the newborn sun, just starting to peek into the windows, but you're not tired. You lean against the bar, pressing your fingers into the final page of your journal, and demand to know what happens next. Who does this Dean shoot? What is the result? How does it all end?_

_She looks at you, her eyes twinkling, her posture almost mannish in its arrogance, and says a single word, which you hurry to copy down. When you look up, she's gone._

_The light coming in the windows is full golden and bright, now, and you can suddenly feel the weight of a night spent sitting and drinking at the bar. You look down at your journal, surprised to see it filled. You could swear this was new, that you bought it only a few days ago, but you must be mistaken. You close it, tuck it away in your bag, and slowly stand, stretching stiff muscles and cracking your joints._

_You've got a long ride ahead of you, today. A hunter has placed an order for a custom revolver; you're meeting up with him to discuss the details._

_As you step to the threshold of the empty bar, you imagine you can hear a woman's voice, telling a strange story, filled with things and people you've never heard of. Something about your competitor, the rifle maker, perhaps? Though you could have sworn his name was Oliver._

_It's gone once you've stepped into the sunlight, dissipated into the morning air, like steam._

_**finis**_


End file.
